


Trouble

by taispeantas_laethuil



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Darkspawn, Gen, Illness, Politics, The Blight, The Grey Wardens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 16:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6617845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taispeantas_laethuil/pseuds/taispeantas_laethuil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian should be heading back to Qarinus to celebrate (ha!) his parent's anniversary. Instead, he accompanies Felix and his mother to the Anderfels- a land where the monarchy is weak, religious zealotry is strong, and the only thing more numerous than Grey Wardens are the darkspawn they fight. </p><p>And then things go terribly wrong. </p><p>Or: what if Dorian had been stricken with the Blight, rather than Felix?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trouble

Dorian had been his apprentice for seven years when he accompanied his wife and son to Hossberg. Seven wildly successful years, it must be said, despite both the supposedly impossible nature of their work and the expectations of most of the rest of the Magisterium.  
  
When he’d first taken Dorian on as an apprentice, everyone had had their opinions. He was wild, out-of-control, and had some truly degenerate tastes which he was too fond of indulging. It wouldn’t be long before he returned to his old habits and neglected his work in favor of such indulgences, they said, and inevitably Gereon would find his home had been transformed into a veritable orgy of sin.  
  
Gereon had always thanked them for their concern, and had become increasingly determined that Dorian should settle in to his household. It’s not as though he wasn’t anticipating problems, of course: he knew of the boy’s reputation, after all, and they’d met in a whorehouse. But, even then, drunk off his ass and undulating between two elven prostitutes, he’d been able to recognize Gereon’s name and connect it to his work. Once he’d extricated himself (and made it obvious that drink wasn’t the only thing he was imbibing) he’d not only helped him locate Felix’s missing Orlesian friend, but had made several salient points about Sindones’ Theory of Multiplicity, especially with regards to overcoming the reconstructionist/revisionist threshold.  
  
It didn’t matter, how much he indulged, so long as he was able to do the work. Given that he’d never found anyone so able when they were dead sober and chaste, he was willing to put up with a lot.  
  
Dorian made him put up with surprisingly little, all things considered. Oh, he was contrary and stubborn and sarcastic, but it wasn’t as though Gereon himself didn’t have those qualities in spades, and half the fun of his work was arguing with a worthy partner. That’s what made his marriage to Livia work, and he found that mentoring Dorian fell in along the same lines. They pushed one another, and pushed the boundaries of thaumaturgy even farther, and had reaped the rewards of their success.

Dorian was now a full Enchanter in the Circle of Minrathous, well on his way to senior membership, one of the youngest ever and the only one who had started out so doubted as to be Harrowed twice. He held an adjunct position, teaching small seminars, giving guest lectures, and was working on his petition to run a small laboratory section. Gereon had gotten to see the fortunes of House Alexius rise: while they were not exactly a political juggernaut, he could say that they had clout now, enough to ensure that when Felix returned from Orlais that he had all the right doors open for him to succeed, and to see that Livia’s research could reach its full potential.  
  
And their _work_. Maker, what they’d accomplished together was nothing short of miraculous. Time dilation had been a groundbreaking theory five years ago, and now it was a reality. A shakily manifested reality which required near-constant supervision, but a reality nonetheless, and they were making real progress in their efforts to focus the spell into a sustained state using some sort of talisman.  
  
He’d intended to work on securing more funding for that endeavor, perhaps using the connections Livia was strengthening in the Anderfels, or by letting Dorian loose on the grant committee at the Circle and seeing what he could come up with.  
  
He’d intended a great many things.  
  
But Dorian had accompanied Livia and Felix to Hossberg, and he couldn’t help but thank the Maker for it. Without him, he would have lost his wife, his son, or both. Instead, they had returned home safe to him, along with his very brave, very ill apprentice.  
  
Gereon had never been one to count his blessings and considered himself content. He was, at heart, a very selfish man. His wife and son were safe and sound now: Dorian need not sacrifice himself for them.  
  
If this worked, he need never have sacrificed himself for them. It could be undone entirely: no attempts at a cure than failed to manifest results, no scrabbling to manage symptoms and slow the progression of the disease. No Blight at all- not for Dorian, at least.  
  
He came across Livia in the cloakroom, watching as she checked the stitches holding the protective runes in her cloak together.  
  
“Interesting day planned in the Senate, my dear?” he asked. “Or are you merely meeting with Halward?”  
  
“Unfortunately, both,” Livia replied. “There’s a crucial vote about funding for education projects one of us should attend, and hopefully I can catch Dorian’s father before he decides to come over unannounced again.” She looked tired- this had been hard on everyone, and Gereon resolved to make it up to her, somehow.  
  
Of course, if it never happened in the first place, then he had nothing to make up for.  
  
“You?”  
  
“A meeting with a potential sponsor,” Gereon told her. “A Lady Calpernia.”  
  
Livia looked up sharply at the lack of house affiliation. “I’ve never heard of her,” she said.  
  
“She’s a bit of a recluse, as I understand it,” Gereon evaded.  
  
Thankfully, Livia took his evasion as an answer, and nodded.  
  
“Be careful,” she implored him, reaching to kiss his cheek.  
  
“I always am, my dear,” he lied.

* * *

 

 _Some months earlier…_  
  
In the main house of the Alexius estate, there was a little roof which lined a small, seldom-used courtyard. The western portion of the roof overlooked a single story, and beyond that, Livia’s laboratory; the eastern portion, meanwhile, was accessible from the windows of the library’s second story. In the evening, after the red roof tiles had greedily soaked up the warmth from afternoon and there was a magnificent view of the sunset, it was one of Dorian’s favorite places to simply sit and be.  
  
Felix settled down next to him, and stole one of his pears.  
  
“Hello, Felix,” Dorian said, cracking one eye open. “Feel free to help yourself.”  
  
“Thanks,” Felix replied around a mouthful of pear.  
  
Dorian rolled his eyes, and pointedly shifted his pears to his other side.  
  
“This tastes a bit like cinnamon,” Felix said, once he’d swallowed.  
  
“It’s one of your mother’s hybrids. Maker only knows whether or not it’s hardy enough to survive growing in the Anderfels, but I could certainly see there being quite the demand for it.”  
  
“Is this the one she named after you, then?”  
  
Dorian pulled a face. Felix laughed at him. “It is!”  
  
“Yes, this is the Dorian cultivar,” he confirmed with a sigh.  
  
“I don’t know why you’re so put out about it,” Felix said, taking another bite. “This is tasty. Mine hardly tasted like anything at all.”  
  
“Could you at least cover your mouth when you do that?” Dorian groused.  
  
Felix made a grumbling noise in response.  
  
“Besides, I liked the Felix cultivar,” Dorian continued. “It was sweet. Much sweeter than the Gereon cultivar, for sure.”  
  
Livia Alexius had been attempting to create some manner of hybrid that could grow in the blighted, dust-ridden desert that was the Anderfels for some time now. She’d had great success with cassava, taff, durum, jojoba, figs and pomegranates, and had since moved on to pears- apparently, pears had some kind of symbolic significance to the Anders people, something to do with rebirth in pre-Andrastean culture being translated into a sign of triumph over the Blight. They were also completely unsuited for growing in a place with so much dust and heat, at least as they grew without Livia's intervention. The first cultivar, Gereon, had taken root readily enough, but the fruits were sour, and being grey with yellow spots, many in the Anderfels feared they were blighted themselves. The Felix cultivar grew only in certain, well-irrigated areas, and then the fruits ripened almost too quickly for the Anders people to harvest them. Livia had taken her time with the Dorian cultivar, ensuring that it could cross-pollinate with the others and running her test seedlings through every manner of test imaginable. It helped, that he and Gereon had managed to push the limits of chronomancy to the point where they could now create a small, stable time dilation field, though it required near-constant monitoring to sustain. Livia could grow several trees to fruit bearing maturity in a matter of months, rather than years- the first of many real, tangible helpful wonders Dorian hoped they would achieve, after years of laying the theoretical groundwork.  
  
The First Warden was supposedly taking a personal interest in the contract between House Alexius and the Anderfels government, now that she was on the cusp of bringing pears back to the banks of the Lattenfluss. The same First Warden who was rumored to want to depose the King. The same First Warden who headed an organization dedicated to defeating Blights.  
  
Politics in the Anderfels were almost delightfully blunt, Dorian reflected.

“Do you ever wonder if Mother is having a joke at our expense when she names these?” Felix asked  
  
“I don’t wonder, I am quite content to presume that to be the case,” Dorian replied. “I’d even lay down money that this cultivar does less well than expected too, and the fourth cultivar somehow manages to hybridize and tie the previous three together into something functional, and that will be the one she’ll name after herself.”  
  
Felix hummed thoughtfully. “What do you think the fruit of the Livia cultivar will taste like?”  
  
Bitter, as though it were only begrudgingly produced, Dorian thought, and then set that thought aside. That was a different Livia to Felix’s mother, after all, and if he wished to be charitable, he might even recall that their engagement was no more her choice than his.  
  
“It will be spectacular, I have no doubt,” he said instead.  
  
For a time they merely lay there, eating pears and watch the clouds drift by as the sun began to dip below the horizon. Finally, when all they had left were the pear cores, Felix spoke. “You’ve packed.”  
  
“Indeed I have,” Dorian confirmed. “It’s nearly time for my yearly visit back to Qarinus for my parents’ anniversary and the incessant reminder that I am neglecting my duties here in Minrathous. Twenty-eight years of misery, and growing stronger every moment they spend in the other’s company, increasing at an exponential rate once I’m present as well.”  
  
He was being just a touch melodramatic- as much as he might loathe these visits, they enabled him to stay in Minrathous, pointedly ignoring the fact that he was well into his twenties and still unwed, pushing the boundaries of magic all the while. It was part custody arrangement with Gereon, part terms of probation with Dorian: he would visit Qarinus for his parents’ anniversary in the summer, visit Asariel for Satinalia in the Winter, and would have some manner of conversation with Father once a fortnight when he was in Minrathous on Senate business. Then, the bare minimum of his familial obligations seen to, he was free to get back to his life, which was full of things to do besides wonder if his mother was drinking so much because of him, or if he would ever be able to have a civil conversation with his father again.  
  
They didn’t make the prospect any less tiresome.  
  
“You don’t have to go back home, you know,” Felix said.  
  
“I’m fairly certain I do,” Dorian replied.  
  
“You could be indisposed,” Felix suggested. “Come to Hossberg with Mother and I.”  
  
“Hossberg,” Dorian repeated flatly. He’d already been to the Anderfels, thank you very much. He’d gone to Weisshaupt with Gereon as part of an academic tit-for-tat with the Wardens, seen the stark beauty and poverty of the place, and had a rather pleasant dalliance with a Warden he still couldn’t believe he’d gotten away with. He could officially cross that off of his list of countries to visit and really felt no need for a second round.  
  
“We’re leaving the day after tomorrow,” Felix reminded him. “And you’re already packed. Father will send his apologies for you, I’m sure.”  
  
“Hossberg,” Dorian said again. “Hossberg, capitol of the Anderfels, a literally blighted nation of heavily armed religious zealots under constant attack from darkspawn- a problem for which they blame Tevinter. That Hossberg.”  
  
“Or you could go to Qarinus and visit with your parents.”

Dorian sighed. Hossberg or Qarinus? A miserable sea journey in the company of Felix and Livia, or a scenic carriage ride on his own? A journey through the extremes of desert climes, surrounded by heavily-armed creatures who like as not wanted him dead on principle _and_ darkspawn, or spending a week in his parent’s company?  
  
It was truly appalling, how difficult a decision that was.  
  
“Would you like a moment to think it over?” Felix asked him.  
  
“Actually, yes, I would,” Dorian replied.  
  
“Well,” Felix said, standing back up. “I’m going to try to drag Father over to Mother’s laboratory for a nightcap some time after sunset. If you decide to go, that would be a good time to tell us.”  
  
“Antivan Brandy?” Dorian asked.  
  
“I’m afraid not. Silent Plains Piquette,” Felix told him.  
  
Dorian grimaced. He held Livia in the highest of esteem, but that did not extend to her tastes in alcohol, which was so common it might as well attempt to better itself by selling itself into slavery. “I’ll be there,” he said.  
  
“Good,” Felix replied, already ducking back in through the window. “See you!”  
  
Dorian waited out on the roof, contemplating his choices, which stubbornly insisted on remaining appallingly difficult. In the end, with the sky a deep red, interspaced with bruise-purple clouds, he reached inside the pocket of his robes and withdrew a coin.  
  
Heads for Qarinus, and gates for Hossberg, he decided, and then flipped for it.  
  
“Well,” he said, looking down at the little replica of the Eyes of Nocen that was stamped into the back of the silver piece in bemusement. “Darkspawn it is then.”

* * *

 

Dorian had never been so glad to see any sort of land, let alone foreign land, as he was when they finally arrived in Tallo- and he’d never been quite so disappointed to learn anything, as he had when he learned that they were taking a river boat down the Lattenfluss as far as Kassel.  
  
“Wasn’t that enough boats for one journey?” Dorian asked, poking forlornly at the vaguely porridge-adjacent substance in the bowl before him with his spoon.  
  
“Poor Dorian,” Felix teased. “Would now be a bad time to point out that we have to make a return journey by sea as well?”  
  
“Yes,” Dorian said with a groan, and pushed his bowl away. The queasiness still hadn’t faded enough to make eating seem a good idea. “Why are we taking boats again? Why are we taking boats at all? If my memory of geography serves me well, then there’s a perfectly serviceable flat plain between Tevinter and the Andefels, why didn’t we go through there?”  
  
“Because all of our contacts in Hossberg have heard that darkspawn are amassing near the Tevinter border,” Livia answered as she strode in. “I thought sea travel was our safest option, especially considering how much of the Qunari naval force is current tied up far east in the Sea of Nocen. Have you managed to keep anything down, Dorian?”  
  
“He hasn’t managed to get anything down,” Felix reported.

Dorian gave him his most withering stare, which Felix blithely ignored.  
  
“Well, try,” Livia told him. “I’ve smoothed out the kinks in our connection with the ferry keeper, and we’re leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”  
  
Dorian sighed, and picked up his spoon again.  
  
“It could be worse,” Felix told him.  
  
“That’s easy for you to say,” Dorian grumbled. Felix was that truly annoying type of person who found sea travel invigorating.  
  
“No, really, it could be worse,” Felix insisted.  
  
Dorian suppressed the urge to sigh again. “Alright, I’ll indulge you. What could be worse than this?”  
  
“There could be darkspawn pirates,” Felix told him, with the sort of solemn intonation he only broke out on occasions where he was being very silly indeed.  
  
Dorian stared flatly at him for about two seconds before reaching out. Felix laughed, and danced back out of the way not quite fast enough to avoid the jolt of static electricity Dorian shot out at his nose.  
  
“Eat, Dorian,” Livia reminded him firmly, before he could try and see if his land legs were back yet so he could give chase. “Honestly, boys, at least try to behave like adults.”  
  
Felix stuck out his tongue. After a moment’s hesitation, Dorian returned the gesture, and Livia rolled her eyes in a near-audible fashion, a fond little smile playing at her lips.

* * *

 

What the river boat mercifully lacked in seasick-inducing motion it made up for in snide comments, as the riverboats’ crew were, to the last man, just simple sailors, men of the river, real dust of the plains types.  
  
Or, in other words, morons.  
  
Combative sanctimonious morons, which wouldn’t be too bad (as, after all, that could describe a good third to a half of the attendees of any social function Dorian had ever been too) if they hadn’t zeroed in on Felix.  
  
It wasn’t hard to understand their logic. Livia was a Magister of no small talent, and they had no way of knowing that talent didn’t extend very far into the realm of offensive spellwork. Dorian, meanwhile, knew any number of offensive spells, and was quite willing to provide a demonstration to any six of the crew, provided with the right provocation. That left Felix, whose cheery politeness was as much a well-honed defense mechanism as Dorian’s sarcastic disassembling, but was less recognizable as such. Felix appeared to be- and in many ways, was- the most vulnerable member of their group.  
  
They didn’t actually want to get into a fight with one of the evil Tevinter magisters. They just wanted to be able to convince themselves that they had _won_ such a fight.  
  
It rankled, but Dorian could have ignored it- if for no other reason than Felix clearly wanted it to be ignored- were it not for the fact that things just kept escalating.  
  
On the first day, there had been some snide remarks, and one of the smaller cabin boys had been pushed forwards by his fellows to ask if, in theory, someone had poured mud down someone else’s shirt, would that get them carted off to Tevinter as a slave?  
  
“Where did the idea that we took people disobedient children come from?” Felix had asked, once he’d assured the child that _no, Maker no, of course not_.  
  
“I don’t know,” Dorian had replied. “Disobedient children make terrible slaves, and drinking their blood has been passé for at least a decade.”  
  
Two days after that, they were bobbing alongside an abandoned farmstead. Well. He said abandoned- what he really meant was razed to the ground, and recently too. He could still see the smoke. He stood with Felix on the ship’s bow, watching, waiting, as the crew attempted to clear the towpath for the mules while keeping one eye on the horizon.  
  
“Should we check for survivors?” Felix asked.  
  
“You’re more likely to find darkspawn,” said the first mate, who was smoking his pipe a few feet away.  
  
“Still,” Felix said.  
  
“It couldn’t hurt to look,” Dorian agreed, mentally planning out what they would need: four of the guards from their retinue, and Livia’s permission, and perhaps make Felix switch out his staff for a heavier one with a better blade…  
  
The first mate laughed at them. “You don’t want to do that,” he told them.  
  
“Oh? Are they teaching mind reading to Anders peasants now?” Dorian asked. “I certainly can’t think of any other reason why you’d presume to tell us what we want.”  
  
The barb missed the man by an oblivious mile. “The Wardens keep their secrets, and that’s only right, but even they have to eat and drink sometimes. You hear things.”  
  
“Is this the one about the talking darkspawn again?” Felix asked. “We’ve already heard that one eight times.”  
  
The first mate snorted, and shook his head. “Nah. This one’s older- it’s said that the darkspawn can tell their own, from the taint the Magisters brought upon the Golden City. The minute you stepped foot on land, they’d be able to sense the same disease that made them, and head right for you, _Magisters_.” He spat the last word out, a bit of tobacco-colored phlegm just missing the hem of Felix’s robes.  
  
“Well. Mother would have to stay on the boat then,” Felix remarked.  
  
“Fortunately neither of us has yet received our Official Magisterial Taint,” Dorian said.  
  
Unfortunately for any potential survivors who might need rescuing, Livia categorically refused to allow them off the boat to so much as stretch their legs, and they were underway again within the hour.

* * *

 

Things came to a head the next day, when a bucket of hot pitch somehow came perilously close to emptying itself over Felix’s head.  
  
Felix, after a moment of shock, laughed it off with an impression of his usual good humor, as though if the bucket had hit its mark it wouldn’t have permanently disfigured him at best. Livia went to go have words with the captain.  
  
Livia had been having words with the Captain twice a day since this particular voyage had started, to no apparent avail. She nodded to Dorian once, sharply, while Felix was still making jokes about becoming waterproof, and Dorian understood.  
  
People had talked, when he’d first become Gereon’s apprentice. Most of it was the salacious twaddle you’d expect when a perverted disgrace-to-his-name prodigal such as himself resurfaced in the public eye after several months absence, which wasn’t helped by the (mercifully little-known) fact that he’d met Gereon in a whorehouse. But the one he’d liked best was the one where he’d been taken on as a bodyguard for Felix.  
  
That one had stuck around even long after they’d started publishing and the other rumors which painted him as either a charity case or a live-in gigolo died down. Partially this was due to the number of duels which Dorian fought over slights to Felix’s worth as an Altus. Mostly, though, it was because Dorian encouraged them. He found the entire concept hilarious, from the part where anyone would look at him and lump him in with the silent, muscle-bound brutes that normally acted as bodyguards all the way up to the part where people would look at him, petrified, for some indication that he didn’t find their comments about the Soporati to be worth the effort of _dealing_ with them. Gereon found it hilarious too, one of many reasons why they worked so well together. Felix hated it, of course; Livia wasn’t particularly enthused either, but her desire to see her son protected outweighed her misgivings.  
  
So, when Dorian tucked himself away in the corner by the bow of the ship where the first mate went to smoke, he had plenty of practice with being intimidating. He had less practice in standing still for an hour waiting for his quarry to arrive, and was therefore bored out of his skull when the first mate actually arrived.

This whole bodyguard business was much more fun as a lark than an actual practice. Still...  
  
The first mate wasn’t alone: he came to his usual smoking spot with a small knot of crewmembers, all obviously just now released from their watch. They gathered around the bow, seemingly oblivious his presence, jostling one another for space. They pulled out their pipes, and then someone pulled out a bag of loose-leaf, and someone else took out a flint and began passing it around, the pungent smell of burning tobacco and Maker only knew what else filling the air.  
  
“Did you see the look on his face?” asked one of the women.  
  
“It looked like he was going to shit himself,” chimed in one of the men.  
  
“It looked like he shat himself,” the first mate corrected.  
  
They all laughed, very definitely oblivious to his presence. Well, time for _that_ to change.

“I was given to understand that the first mate’s job was to discipline the crew,” he said as he stepped into view, charging the air with enough static electricity to make one’s hair stand on end.  
  
The first mate started slightly, and turned to face him, his pipe dangling from his lower lip. “Yes, it is. Why? Do you have a complaint?”  
  
The long wait had cooled his temper enough to remember all the reasons why actually harming this man would be bad for all parties involved, and to keep those reasons in the forefront of his mind.  
  
_Intimidation, not immolation,_ he could practically hear Gereon say.  
  
“Not as such,” he replied, holding eye contact with the first mate and letting the silence draw out uncomfortably long. He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t attempt to cast some kind of weak horror spell over the crew, and then decided against it: they were uneasy enough as it was, and he didn’t want them to panic and form up into some kind of lynch mob.  
  
“There is something which I want to make absolutely certain you understand,” he said, summoning a bit of fire to his fingertips. “If Felix asked me to, I would burn this boat of yours to ash. Quite cheerfully, after the abominable way you’ve behaved. Thankfully for both you and the state of my boots, Felix is far too nice to even suggest such a thing.”  
  
He took a step towards the crew, who shrank back against the railing, their hands on their knives.  
  
“I’m not a nice man,” he explained. “If anything should happen to Felix, I might become downright spiteful.” He reached out and lit the first mate’s pipe, before banishing his conjured fire back to the Fade. “I trust we understand one another.”  
  
There was quite a lot more he wanted to say, about their ingratitude towards the people who, after all, were doing their best to help make this blighted wasteland remotely habitable, about how easy it would be for him to take them apart.  
  
But that would have spoiled his exit, so he simply turned and left, his robes billowing out behind him as he walked around the edges of the main cabin.  
  
Felix was waiting for him out front, his eyebrow raised.  
  
“If you keep making that face, it’ll stick, you know,” he said.  
  
“If you keep doing this, I don’t think anyone will notice,” Felix retorted. “I don’t need you to protect me.”  
  
“Oh, rest assured, I’m not doing this for you,” Dorian told him. “It’s all in my own self-interest. I don’t care to find out what your father’s reaction would be if I brought you home with your face melted into resembling an overripe avocado.”  
  
Felix rolled his eyes.  
  
“Besides, he made a very satisfying face when I lit his pipe up for him,” Dorian added.  
  
“Did you use a horror spell to get that face?” Felix asked after a moment, interested in the details despite himself.  
  
“Perish the thought,” Dorian said, as though he had never considered it. “I might have gotten their filth on my robes when they soiled themselves.”  
  
Felix rolled his eyes again, and Dorian considered himself forgiven.

* * *

 

When they docked in Kassel, they discovered that they rated a Warden escort.  
  
Or, well. Livia had at least suspected that would be the case, as she had them change into their formal robes before disembarking. Dorian had his usual set of robes, the ones he’d originally intended to wear in Qarinus, where the sea breeze was constant, and the estate had dwarven runes placed near the windows and air vents, ready and waiting to activate in order to cool any room worth mentioning. They weren’t heavy, exactly, but it was three layers of silk and then a dark blue, velvet cloak that soaked up the heat from the desert sun and held it close. Dorian wondered if he might be able to at least ditch that part of his outfit, but had a feeling that would spoil the look. Livia and Felix had modified their robes: light-colored cloaks of bamboo linen and a more reasonable number of layers beneath. Livia even had short sleeves.  
  
The Wardens were all decked out in full armor, but seemed completely unbothered by the beating of the sun upon the leather and metal they wore. There were five of them in total. Two were human, a scar-faced woman with a sword and tower shield who looked as though she’d been hewn from sandstone, and a man, an archer whose fingers and face were stained with the same green color as many of the people fussing with the mules. There was also an elf, a dark-skinned and red-haired man wielding a mace and small round shield, and a dwarven archer, a freckle-faced woman who beamed up at them, seemingly the only person to be happy to see their safe arrival.  
  
There was also, standing head and shoulders above her companions and clearly in charge, a Qunari. Not just any garden variety hulking muscular Qunari either- a mage, her graphite-dark staff the same shade of grey as her skin and her horns wrapped in some kind of copper that glinted in the midday sun. Her face was partially hidden beneath the strange metallic warpaint they all seemed to wear- _vitaar_ , was it?- painted to look like feathers. She was a _saarebas_. An actual Qunari _saarebas_.  
  
Though, this one was a little bit lacking in stitching and leashes. That was something at least.  
  
If Livia was thrown by her appearance, she was much better at hiding it than Dorian was. She stepped forwards gamely to meet the Qunari halfway, when the Qunari asked “Magister Livia Alexius, I presume?”  
  
“I am,” Livia replied. “You’re the local Warden-Lieutenant, I take it?”  
  
“Warden-Lieutenant, yes, local, no,” the Qunari held out a massive hand for her to shake, which she did after the barest of hesitation. “I’m Warden-Lieutenant Asaaranda Aban, at your service. My men and I are here to see your party safely to Hossberg.”  
  
Livia’s eye flicked over the group, assessing. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. This is my son, Felix of House Alexius, and my husband’s apprentice, Dorian of House Pavus.”  
  
He inclined his head in greeting, and was surprised to see a flicker of recognition on the Qunari’s face. Surely his reputation wasn’t so infamous as to have reached Qunari ears?  
  
“You were in Weisshaupt with Magister Gereon Alexius during his visit, were you not?” she asked.  
  
“Yes, I was,” he told her. “I must admit, I don’t remember seeing you there.”  
  
“I was not,” she replied. “But a good friend of mine was, Eram Kader.”

Well. Apparently he was gossip fodder for the Wardens as well as the Magisterium. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, really. “Ah,” he managed eloquently.  
  
“He spoke quite highly of you,” she continued. “You heard that he-”  
  
“Yes, word of his passing reach Minrathous some months ago,” Dorian cut her off hastily. The river boat must have been more turbulent than he’d first thought, with how violently his stomach plunged.  
  
“He died well,” she said, despite his very clear wishes that she _stop talking_. “He helped take down a nest of darkspawn that were spawning near Nordbotten.”  
  
“Well, that’s something,” Dorian managed.  
  
“It’s the most we can hope for,” she replied, and somehow that moved things along to introducing the other Wardens.

Dorian half paid attention to learning their names- the human woman was Gayiane Lernig, the human man Eringisel Varoujan, the dwarven woman Lily Harding and the elven man Leuthard of Starkhaven- and half dreading the conversation he could feel Felix planning.  
  
Sure enough, the moment they began to walk away, Felix turned to him and hissed. “Who’s Eram Kader?”  
  
“A Warden I spent some time with when I came to Weisshaupt with your father,” Dorian told him. “We kept up a correspondence after I left.”  
  
“Did you have a paramour and forget to tell me?”  
  
“He wasn’t my- _paramour_? Really? Where do you pick these things up, Felix?”  
  
“Five years at the University of Orlais, remember?”  
  
“Well, put it back down,” Dorian hissed. “If for no other reason than the fact that the man’s dead.”  
  
Felix’s expression morphed into one of remorse, and Dorian resisted the urge to rub his suddenly aching temples. “I don’t mean it to tease,” he said apologetically. “I just don’t like the idea of you having such a relationship- and a loss- and not being able to speak of it.”  
  
“Well,” Dorian said, at a loss as to how to explain things. “I appreciate the sentiment.”  
  
It hadn’t been like that, really, it hadn’t. They’d had a pleasant fortnight in one another’s company, and then they’d exchanged naughty letters for a time afterwards, the omnipresent threat of blackmail mitigated by the way that most of Tevinter stayed well clear of the Wardens in fear of either catching the Blight or mingling with Soporati, and well. It wasn’t as though anyone would need confirmation of his preferences by now.  
  
That he’d taken to writing naughty letters with a dwarf might have come as a surprise, however.  
  
Still. It wasn’t as though it had been some kind of grand love affair. He hadn’t exactly been pleased to hear that he’d died, and he still had his letters tucked safely away back in the Alexius estate, but.  
  
Of course, now that he was dead and apparently people were going to know about those letters, it just seemed as disrespectful as it was honest to say it. Especially considering that he was surrounded by the man’s friends.  
  
Eram’s friends, who had apparently heard good things about Dorian from him. When Dorian hadn't spoken a word about him to even Felix.  
  
Dorian gave into temptation and pressed his fingertips to either side of his forehead. He was going to regret coming here, wasn’t he?

* * *

“The darkspawn that are amassing near the Tevinter border are coming from all over,” the Warden-Lieutenant explained. “They move north through Nevarra and Antiva, and they’re heading through the Anderfels from as far away as the Wandering Hills. That’s why we’re coming with you- and the rest of the caravan.”  
  
“And they’re all heading towards Tevinter?” Livia asked.  
  
“There can’t be another Blight, can there?” Dorian added. “Wasn’t there just one of those down in Fereldan?”  
  
“There’s no rule that says that the Blights can’t be close together, instead of ages apart,” said Leuthard. His accent was unexpected, and it took Dorian a moment to parse what had sounded to his ears like “There’s nae rule 'at says 'at th' Blights cannae be close together, insteid ay ages apart.”  
  
“Well, yes, I suppose not, but it hasn’t even been a decade yet,” Dorian argued.  
  
“We don’t believe this to be a Blight,” interrupted Aban.  
  
“You don’t?” Livia asked. “Then why-”  
  
“A gathering of darkspawn such as this is not unheard of, especially soon after a Blight,” Aban explained. “Sometimes an archdemon’s lieutenants will return to the Deep Roads after it is slain, only to resurface years later, still possessing a great degree of control over their underlings.”  
  
There was definitely something she wasn’t telling them, but Livia pointedly did not press for details, and Dorian felt like it was impolitic to contradict her. Instead, he checked and double-checked the enchantments on Livia’s pears and pear-adjacent equipment, and tried not to stare too obviously at the Green People.  
  
Literally, that’s what they were called, the Green People, some sort of honest-to-Andraste _nomadic tribe_ of humans that specialized in carting goods overland all the way to Laysh on the Volca Sea. He gathered from the banter that Varoujan had once counted himself amongst their number, and several of the current members of their caravan were some kind of cousins of his.  
  
This did not seem to stop Leuthard and Harding from flirting outrageously with them. Nor did it stop them from flirting with the _same_ Green Person, at the same time, apparently with the intent of taking them to bed at the same time, with no preference for gender whatsoever.  
  
“You know, that’s normal here,” Felix said, plopping down against the wagon, which creaked in protest at the sudden increase in weight.  
  
“Oh?” Dorian asked, biting back the instinctual retorts about the fact that he was exceptional _everywhere_ , thank you very much.  
  
“Rumor has it that the new High Constable is a woman, and that she has a wife,” Felix said.  
  
“I- what?” Dorian said, almost dropping his staff.  
  
Felix nodded sagely.  
  
“I was under the impression that Wardens weren’t permitted to marry,” he said, busying himself with Livia’s pears once more.  
  
“That’s a common misconception,” said Aban from behind them. “It would be more accurate to say that we aren’t advised to take a spouse, but there are instances where it can work. Are things ready for travel?”  
  
“As much as they can be,” Dorian managed.  
  
“Good. We’ll be leaving in just a few moments. You might want to work out who is riding first, and who is walking.”  
  
She swept away, her Warden’s robes billowing out behind her impressively.  
  
“I only meant that most of the Anderfels seems to think it would be strange not to take up with a Warden, if a Warden offered,” Felix said, partially apologetically, partially still wheedling. “Gender is no object.”  
  
“Felix,” Dorian said with a sigh. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but leave my love life with me, please.”  
  
Felix nodded reluctantly, and let the matter drop as the caravan got underway.

The Green People seemed to have the same aversion to magic in general and mages from Tevinter in particular as the crew of the riverboat. They kept to themselves, mostly, and kept themselves as far away from those associated with House Alexius as they could.  
  
The same could not be said of the Wardens, who in addition to acting as a go-between for Livia and the Green Leader seemed quite content to act as tour guides for Felix and Dorian. Not that there was much touring to be done- though the Anders countryside was beautiful, where it wasn’t nauseatingly pastoral it was a stark, desolate beauty that Dorian felt he might better appreciate as an engraving hung on the walls of some civilized place where people would not clutch their children in fear as he passed, where the dust didn’t make his eyes water and where the temperature didn’t swing wildly from unrelenting heat to freezing cold.  
  
After a few night's consternation, Dorian conceded to the inadequacy of his normal traveling cloak, and began to keep his formal velvet cloak at the top of his bags, ready to be retrieved the moment the sun dipped down below the horizon, and complained bitterly about the entire affair. Felix had the gall to be not only amused by his complaints, but to seem genuinely enthralled by the sights, such as they were.  
  
_Look, here’s a canal. And look, here’s a farm. Here’s another farm. Another canal. Another farm. Yet another farm. Look, now two canals are intersecting. And see, this farm grows hashish rather than a food product._  
  
“Look Felix, there’s you,” Dorian would say, pointing to the pear trees that dotted the landscape.  
  
“Are you going to say that every time we pass one of those?” Felix asked.  
  
“You,” Dorian retorted, pointing to another pear tree. “You, you, you-”  
  
He had to get as much reciprocal annoyance as he could. Felix would likely remain chipper after they left the Blessed Three Lakes region where his cultivar could grow, and Dorian would only find it all the more grating for the lack of humidity.  
  
Sure enough, as they left behind the intricate lattice of canals and irrigation ditches and pushed into the petrified forests of what might have once been considered a savannah, the Felix pears disappeared, and Felix himself remained as animated as ever.

* * *

 

Despite the fact that it was the height of summer, dust was still prevalent in the Anderfels. It wasn’t the flesh-stripping storms he’d heard stories of, but rather an omnipresent grit that settled into the creases of his robes, the lining of his boots and and the space between his teeth. His formal cloak was sure to be ruined before they reached Hossberg. Livia loaned him one of her scarves to wrap around his face to keep the worst of the dust out. It almost worked.  
  
The Green People continued to keep their distance from their group, even avoiding the guards brought along to act as their retinue. They interacted only as much as it took for the Tevinter contingent to refill their canteens and the reservoir for Livia’s cuttings, and to have their own reservoir topped off with the ice she summoned.  
  
“Why aren’t we just filling up on the little springs we come across?” Dorian asked, pointing to one of the little springs that, admittedly, seemed to do practically nothing for the landscape at large.  
  
“Because none of us want to die of alkaline poisoning,” Harding told him. “Or, if we’re close to a camping ground, dysentery.”  
  
“With all the darkspawn about, there’s also the Blight to worry about as well,” Leuthard reminded them.  
  
The Wardens were his only choice for conversation besides Felix and Livia, and given the dearth of weather or landscape to discuss, he ended up learning a bit about them. The Anders contingent, which consisted of the humans and their Warden-Lieutenant, had all volunteered for the position, as had Harding. He gathered that Leuthard had not, and that his case, which apparently involved charges of murder, was far more typical of the Wardens than volunteerism.  
  
And what a charming little fact that had been to have confirmed.  
  
He also learned that Aban had a wife- _she had a wife_ , and Felix nudged his side as though he might have missed the significance of the words somehow- a fact which was apparently signified by the dangling fang necklace she wore around her neck. Leuthard and Harding were some kind of couple, and apparently quite determined to fuck their way through the population of Thedas as a couple. Dorian recommended that they avoid Tevinter. Lernig had a husband back in the Orthlands, or rather, had had a husband: a divorce had been granted by the Grand Cleric when she joined the Wardens. “It’s not fair, to expect him not to wander when I must go so far from home” she explained.  
  
Varoujan was single. Or, as he had put it with a patently ridiculous leer “Free as a bird, and twice as likely to sing.”  
  
Dorian would have perhaps minded a bit less if he hadn’t said it right in front of Livia. Or if he hadn’t suddenly felt the judging weight of the other Wardens’ eyes upon him.  
  
In Tevinter, it never did to hope for something permanent, or something with more passion or comfort than you could get from a night or two’s fun, even if the arrangement lasted longer than a night or two. Here, where women married women and presumably men married men, there seemed to be the opposite expectation: that it would mean something, and mean something with endurance.  
  
He wasn’t sure how they’d gotten that out of two weeks dalliance and some naughty letters, but apparently they had, and the last thing he wanted now was for them to get the impression that he’d lead their now-deceased comrade on.

They left the petrified forest with its disease-ridden alkaline springs and strange knocking birds and entered the plains proper. The sound of dry stalks of grass rubbing against one another as insects buzzed unseen amongst them was going to haunt his dreams. The land was flat and seemingly endless: it was hard to tell how far away things were, and how big they would be once they were reached. Was that tree ten feet tall and five miles away, or was it twenty feet and ten miles?  
  
“Leave the navigating to us,” Aban advised.  
  
The fang around her neck was from a wyvern (apparently, dragons were the traditional choice for such a necklace, but they were also in short supply) and she was not Qunari, per say, having never known the Qun. Vashoth was the term she preferred- the one Dorian knew, kossith, apparently did not apply. Harding was from Fereldan, a place called Redcliffe. She’d been born on the surface, and had been inspired to join the Wardens when she’d fought to defend her home alongside the Hero of Fereldan during the Fifth Blight. Leuthard’s murder had been committed when he’d killed a man who’d been attempting to force himself on his mother, which did not seem very much like murder to Dorian.  
  
“Wouldn’t that count as self-defense?” he asked. “I mean, if he was as you say…”  
  
“Would that argument work in Tevinter?” Leuthard asked.  
  
“I’ve certainly dueled over lesser affronts,” Dorian told him. “It’s not encouraged to kill people in those, of course, but no one seems especially surprised when that happens.”  
  
“Would that argument work with an elf who killed a minor nobleman in Tevinter?” Leuthard clarified.  
  
It was on the tip of Dorian’s tongue to explain that not every elf was a slave in Tevinter, that there were many free elves, and even elven members of the Senate in both of its houses. Then he considered his audience, and how limit his choice of conversational partners was at present.  
  
Then he considered how few free elves he’d ever interacted with before in any capacity that wasn’t a whorehouse. He wasn’t sure he even knew any of them by name.  
  
“I suppose you have a point,” he conceded.  
  
He was also reminded that when Felix got to talking about the trouble they got into, he was terminally incapable of not interrupting his stories with corrections.  
  
“ _Vishante kaffas_ , Felix, you’re making it sound like we’re some sort of vigilante crime fighting team.”  
  
“Well, I wouldn’t want to imply that we don’t get into trouble, just that we’re not always out looking for it, and generally the trouble is deserved.”  
  
“Well, what would the world be if we all got what we deserved,” Dorian said with a philosophical shrug.  
  
“You did kill her for being a maleficar, though,” Felix pointed out.  
  
“Yes, but it’s not as though I challenged her on those grounds,” Dorian reminded him. “I challenged her because she insulted your father and questioned the validity of our work- fell just short of accusing us of fraud, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t even sure she practiced that sort of blood magic until her apprentices came out with the intended sacrifice.”  
  
Dorian had gone over all the facts until he could speak coldly and rationally about every potential motive and every potential repercussion immediately after they'd returned to the Alexius estate. He was, after all, to have lunch with his father the day after, and he’d doubtlessly have questions.  
  
In the heat of the moment, however, he hadn’t had the stomach for rationality, and had merely thought _the world will be a better place without you in it._  
  
Nathausia Tamond had not been the first person he’d killed. But those kills happened because the other person had escalated the fight first, or as the result of an accident, someone standing too close to a ledge or stepping into a fireball they were meant to step away from. Nathausia was different. He’d _wanted_ her dead.

“She thought it would shock me into dropping my guard. It was her mistake, and she paid for it,” Dorian told them.  
  
“I wouldn’t have thought blood magic would shock any magister,” Varoujan remarked.  
  
“Well, they haven’t seen fit to give me my magisterial evil license yet,” Dorian pointed out. “Besides, House Pavus has always been staunchly opposed to the use of blood magic.”  
  
It was one of the few things he and his father could agree upon unequivocally. Father might view his career in academia as a distraction from his true duties and consider his apprenticeship to be nothing more than Gereon’s attempts at solving a succession crisis, while Dorian in turn found himself disinterested by the war on Seheron and quite a lot more than disinterested in marriage, and these facts were unlikely to change.  
  
But, at least they could categorically agree that maleficarum had no place in the Imperium.  
  
Father had been almost pleased when he’d heard all the details of that duel, though that was probably also in part due to the way he’d been able to parley that information into causing the succession for the office of Magister Tamond to go up for grabs, and to manipulate things so that the newest Magister Tamond owed him for his post.  
  
He’d known that going in, however. His father was a skilled politician, and part of the reason why House Pavus was currently so prominent in the Magisterium. Meanwhile, the members of House Alexius would like as not have seen no reason to act upon that information. Livia could hold her own readily enough, but lacked the ambition to keep pressing the importance of her House, and Gereon seemed to view his trips to the Magisterium as a particularly odious form of grant writing.  
  
“Well, against blood magic except for that one time with Magister Elenoi’s son,” Felix said, dragging him out of his head.  
  
“That wasn’t blood magic,” Dorian protested. “It was magic used to levitate a large quantity of pig’s blood over the garden wall, not magic using blood as a source of power.”  
  
They continued on in that vein until Aban called their party to a halt for the night.

* * *

 

They switched out their mules for dromedaries at a little oasis town called Oranberg. Well. He said little town, but by the standards of the Anderfels, it was a bustling metropolis with a great many shops and stables for travelers, four entire taverns, and a rather omnipresent group of watchmen. They each had different tasks to do while they were in what passed as civilization after two weeks of nothing but wilderness. The Green People had the cold runes in their condensation collectors checked over by the Tranquil staffing the local branch of that The Wonders of Thedas store chain that seemed to fund the Southern Chantry. Dorian found someone to sell him a thick travelling cloak and attempt to salvage his formal one: Felix helped him pick it out while Livia was topping off her supply of citronella to ward off the bugs. The three of them were invited along with the Wardens to dine with the local Margravine and Warden-Lieutenant in what might be generously termed the Margravine’s town house.  
  
The landscape from that point on was less dry grass and more scrublands, consisting of small bushes, the odd cactus, and a surfeit of tumbleweeds. Wildlife made itself known mostly at night: jackals howling, aurochs lowing, the occasional piercing screech- and once, the gigantic shadow between the moons of a roc. There was, if possible, even more dust. He was beginning to see why so many of the Anders walked around veiled.  
  
Dorian knew they were drawing nearer to Hossberg when he started to see the buttresses: little homesteads and taverns and watchtowers and even a chantry, carved into the buttes that jutted out of the earth as they drew nearer to the Merdaine. They had seen a few of them, when he’d gone to Weisshaupt with Gereon, but those had largely been utilitarian institutions, military outposts for the Wardens.  
  
These were works of _art_. The chantry in particular was sublime: the spiral stairs leading up to the prayer hall were comprised of hands lifted in prayer: the faces beneath them were worn with dust and time, but still startlingly detailed. He could see the pimples on one girl’s face, the lines and age spots on the old woman next to her, and on the next level up, there were two middle-aged men turned towards one another, clearly one breath away from a kiss. The entire structure tapered, growing ever more narrow as it grew closer to the top, ending in a bell tower. They could hear it tolling a full day before the chantry was more than a spec on the horizon.  
  
“Some say that the Masons practiced for carving the Lady of the Anderfels by carving the Redeemer on the Plains,” Lernig told him, when she noticed his staring. “Others say that when the Lady was finished, one of the Masons returned to this spot. She carved for years, and when she was finished, took up vows to become the first Revered Mother of this chantry.”  
  
“I’d heard as much,” Dorian replied.

Eram had written to him of them, of course, had waxed rhapsodic about the buttresses to the east of Hossberg for pages upon pages. Dorian had considered it to be a symptom of homesickness on his part, a longing for the Stone he heard so much about whenever the Ambassadoria was having some kind of function, and had in return spoken of new exhibits being shown at the Arcanist Hall, the status of Tevinter’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of Thedas, and a few contentious points of history in an effort to distract. _Have you heard that the Lady of the Anderfels was constructed after the fall of something called the Order of the Red Bride? They were a monastic group of spelunking brothers or some such. The Anders version says that one of them was an apostate, who revealed himself when bandits attacked, summoning demons and causing the entire order to be raised from the dead after the bandits had finished with them. The Tevinter version is much different: in that version, there was a brother from our Chantry, a fully qualified enchanter of the Minrathous Circle before he took up vows. He attempted to defend the order by summoning spirits, but they were fearful of his magic and murdered him, causing the summoning to go drastically awry. Maker only knows what the truth is._  
  
It was startling to realize how little of their correspondence had been filth in the end. Quantitatively, it hadn’t changed, but proportionally… their letters had been rather long in the end. Practically a book. Felix had thought his last letter had been some kind of secret dissertation, and Dorian had not seen fit to disabuse him of that notion.  
  
Perhaps the Wardens were not so misguided in their beliefs about Eram and Dorian after all. It still hadn’t been much of anything, but in other life, perhaps there would have been potential that could have been realized.  
  
If nothing else, he could concede that it wasn’t as though Eram had read something out of nothing, as Dorian had given him quite a lot of something to read. And, he supposed, he might as well admit, if only to himself, that he missed those letters.  
  
He missed Eram, for all that they hadn’t been in one another's sight for longer than a fortnight. It was completely ridiculous, from start to finish. They would have been doomed before the start of it, and now, long after the end, he was just beginning to realize that there might have been something in between.  
  
And what a useless revelation it was.

* * *

 Their first clue that things were about to go horribly wrong was the cloud of dust on the horizon.  
  
_Aurochs_ , reported the scouts they sent ahead to get a better picture of what was happening. _They’re stampeding._  
  
No one seemed to think there was anything out of the ordinary about it. They fastened the blinders over the eyes of their dromedaries, Aban took care of her massive war horse, and they circled their wagons behind an outcropping of rock, the condensation catchers and Livia’s pears well-defended in the center.  
  
They waited. The aurochs came: feral cousins of the cattle raised in Tevinter, chests heaving, eyes rolling madly in their head and they panicked forwards, just heedful enough to eschew their caravan. As they passed, a handful of the Green People shot into the stampede before their leader cut them off with a hiss. The dust kicked up by the stampede made it difficult to see beyond the barrier Livia had conjured around them, but he could hear the panicked lowing of an injured animal for several minutes before it abruptly stopped.  
  
Once the herd had thinned a little, Dorian could tell that the aurochs weren’t the only things running. There were also jackals, skirting around the edges of the herd. They didn’t appear to be hunting the beasts, merely running alongside of them. The same could be said for the caracals. And the terror birds. And the thylacines.  
  
And the antelopes. And the ratels. And the gurns. And the karkadanni. And the diprotodons. And the ostriches. And the wild pigs.  
  
“Dorian, look,” Felix said, pointing upwards.  
  
At first he thought it was some sort of cloud. He supposed it might still qualify, if only in a figurative sense. It was a flock of birds however- or more accurately, several flocks of birds, ranging from tiny little swifts to great giant rocs, all meshed together in their panicked flight from-  
  
“This isn’t normal for a stampede, is it?” Dorian asked.  
  
“Not as far as I know,” Felix said.  
  
“No,” Livia said shortly. “It isn’t.”  
  
There were so many birds that they blotted out the sun. An uneasy murmur went up from the caravan, echoed in the uncomfortable shifting of their mounts. Aban conjured a mage-light: Livia followed suit, and Dorian would have as well, had he not caught the motion of something over the lip of the outcropping caught his eye.  
  
He conjured actual fire instead, and the fireball hit the creature only a second after the arrows from the Wardens.  
  
“Nice shot, Pavus,” Varoujan called.  
  
“I don’t make bad shots,” Dorian retorted on pure reflex.  
  
Finally, eventually, mercifully, the stampede and the flock and everything else passed them by. The dust settled, Livia released her barriers with a sigh, and Dorian got a good look at the thing he’d helped kill.

It was a jackal. Or rather, he realized as the bottom dropped out of his stomach, it was like something that might have once been a jackal, before it swelled to thrice its usual size, grew fangs as long as his forearm, and had spikes protrude from the strip of black fur down its back.  
  
“I’ve heard it said that when some creatures are stricken with the Blight, they don’t just die,” Dorian said. “They mutate.”  
  
“You’ve heard correctly,” Lernig told him.  
  
“Ah,” Dorian said. The near-requisite quip of _It’s such a burden, being right,_ died on his tongue. “Ah,” he repeated instead.  
  
“It happens to humans too,” Varoujan reported, sounding far too cheerful. “And elves. And dwarves. And Qunari. Ghouls, we call them.”  
  
“Lovely,” Dorian replied, and went to sit next to Felix in their wagon.  
  
Livia disappeared into the Warden’s wagon with the Green Leader and the Warden Lieutenant. By the time the women had emerged again, it was nearly sundown: they had decided to send a group of five scouts ahead, the rest of them would follow along at half speed come the morning. With luck they would spot the oncoming horde and be able to report its position back to them. Ideally, they would make it clear to the Circle of Magi outside of Hossberg, but only a fool would count on the ideal.  
  
The scouts left. The rest of them set up camp, grouping closer together than they previously had thought wise. It was quiet: far, far too quiet. No one felt much like talking, and there were none of the sounds Dorian had come to ignore on this journey. There were no insects buzzing in his ear, no distant sounds of aurochs grazing or being preyed upon. There was just the quiet, maddening hiss of dust on stone, and his own breathing, his own heartbeat.  
  
It reminded him of one of the old tales: the Lost City of Barindur, sentenced to complete and utter silence for an offense paid to the High Priest of Dumat by its king. He’d never thought highly of that particular tale. Part of it was all the disagreeable moralizing that had inevitably been tacked onto the end, but most of it was that he simply found the sentence to be a bit much. Silence, even when taken to an extreme stretch of meaning and considered complete and total obliteration, seemed like a very trite punishment indeed.  
  
He felt it keenly now, however: the oppressive horror of the lack of sound when there should have been plenty to spare.  
  
He slept poorly that night. The attack on their caravan came at midmorning the following day.

* * *

 The darkspawn were, as their name implied, utterly ghastly, comprised of necrotizing tissue stretched over rictus smiles and protuberant bones. Dorian would have preferred being attacked by corpses. Corpses he understood. Corpses he’d made a study of. Corpses were, no matter what plebian superstitions attached themselves to both cadavers and the people who handled them, a completely natural phenomenon.  
  
Darkspawn were not.  
  
They’d had enough warning to circle the wagons again. The Green People formed their lines, dividing themselves between the ground between the wagons and on top of them. They must have cut down half of the darkspawn before the horde came within melee range. Livia stood on top of the wagon bearing her pears and cast a static barrier around the whole of the caravan: Dorian stood with her, lobbing fireballs at any darkspawn that began edging too close to her perimeter. It was almost unnecessary. The darkspawn might not be natural, but they were the Wardens’ business, and the Wardens turned out to be shockingly good at their business.  
  
It wasn’t as though Dorian had doubted their competence. He hadn’t. He just also hadn’t imagined the uncanny coordination they would fight with. Harding and Varoujan sometimes seemed to shoot without aiming, somehow picking off darkspawn that were inches away from their comrades without error. Leuthard and Lernig fought with lethal fluidity, moving cleanly from kill to kill as though they were partners in a very energetic dance. All of their weapons had been enchanted with ice runes: though the ice that conjured melted quickly in the desert heat before it could deal out too much damage, the moisture it left behind was a boon all its own. Aban was a storm mage, and her lightning was drawn to the water as smoothly as it was drawn to metal, and as smoothly as it merged with Livia’s static cage to maximize the damage it dealt.  
  
Honestly, Dorian felt a bit like he was getting in the way. If it weren’t for Felix, standing guard by the wagon behind their retinue, his heavy staff in hand with its blade at the ready, and Livia, draining herself dry to keep them all safe, he might very well sit down and let the Wardens handle it.  
  
Instead, he immolated a shriek that made itself known when it tried to breach the perimeter and found it made of lightning.  
  
The fight was over after several minutes- perhaps a quarter of an hour, certainly not much more. Livia held the barrier for a few moments after the last darkspawn was felled, before releasing it with a sigh. Dorian dropped down from the carriage, and walked over the where the Wardens were lingering.  
  
“That was magnificent,” he complimented them. He even managed not start when all five of them suddenly turned to him.  
  
“Get back to your wagon, Pavus,” Aban said, far too calmly.  
  
“I-” Dorian began.  
  
The Warden-Lieutenant cut him off. “This isn’t over yet. Get back to your wagon, please.”  
  
Dorian returned to their wagon. Once he had, he could see the gathering dust on the horizon to the south of them.  
  
“Why aren’t we moving?” he asked. “Surely we might at least be able to get out of their way?”  
  
“That stampede was indicative of a very large horde,” Livia told him. “It’s presumed to be traveling somewhere west of us, where the Circle of Magi is. That’s the only place nearby where we could shelter. It’s also the place the darkspawn are mostly likely to be drawn to. If we run, we risk having to deal with two hordes simultaneously.”  
  
“Ah,” Dorian said.  
  
_Did the scouts you sent ahead know that?_ he wanted to ask. But what would have been the point? The scouts were gone, and here the rest of them sat, waiting for more darkspawn to arrive.

* * *

 The second horde was bigger, both in terms of darkspawn numbers, and in terms of size. There were ogres- two of them, in fact. The first was brought down through the combined and massive efforts of the Wardens before it reached the caravan. They were not so lucky with the other one.  
  
It charged right through Livia’s static cage with a howl, impaling its horns on one of the other wagons. Cloth and metal ingots scattered around as the ogre shook itself free: so did the dromedaries, panicked out of their nervous shuffling by the closeness of the attack.  
  
Dorian wondered, with the sort of suppressed hysteria that focused itself upon anything that wasn’t impending death, how they would get the caravan moving without them.  
  
The ogre stood with a roar. Some of the Green People retreated, firing as they sought the fragile cover of other wagons: others handed off their quivers, slung their bows across their backs, and unsheathed daggers before charging ahead.  
  
With daggers. _Daggers_. Some of which were smaller than kitchen knives. Against an _ogre_.  
  
Dorian lobbed as many fireballs as he could at the beast. The ogre, in turn, fixed its gaze on him, and then lowered its head, preparing to charge again. It was swarmed immediately, which stopped it in its tracks, but appeared to do little else.  
  
Next to him, Livia swore vociferously. “Captain!” was the first thing she said that wasn’t some sort invective.  
  
“I see it, Magister!” the captain of their retinue replied. Her men were already forming up between the ogre and the wagon, shields up and javelins pointed forwards.  
  
“Felix!” Livia called. “Felix, get up here, now!”  
  
Dorian wasn’t sure it was safer being on wagon than off it-  
  
-one of the Green People managed to swing herself onto the ogres’ back and for a moment it looked like she would sever the beast’s spine-  
  
-“Dorian,” Livia was saying urgently. “Dorian, I need you to do something. We need you.” But he couldn’t-  
  
-the ogre reared back with force, and she hit one of the wagons, hard. The wood shattered and her helmet was knocked off, revealing her too-young, too-scared face-  
  
-there wasn’t enough room to conjure a wall of fire between the wagons-  
  
-blood trickled out of her mouth and then she died, Dorian could feel it, the way spirits clamored towards the moment-  
  
-Could he mine the ground, between the ogre and the wagon? Or would that only burn the Green People still trying to fight it? Could he-  
  
-Livia threw lightning at the ogre, a weak bolt that did little more damage than the arrows pelting it. He lobbed another fireball out of pure reflex, but-  
  
-the ogre lowered its head again, and the world seemed to narrow around it, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t-  
  
Would necromancy work on darkspawn? Had they been alive enough to begin with for their corpses to be raised by him, or would it be like trying to force the possession of a suit of armor?  
  
Well, he was about to find out.

There were plenty of people who posited necromancy as a form of spellbinding. You simply summoned a spirit and bound it into the corpse, never mind what sort of spirit it was. Gereon, and subsequently Dorian, subscribed to the theory that it was both easier and safer to use the wraiths that were naturally attracted to the dead and dying: minor proto-spirits of little substance, which were easier to bend to ones’ will and easier still to banish back to the Fade.  
  
Livia’s barrier shrouded them as he closed his eyes, concentrating on the Veil and what lay beyond it. He did not go into the Fade- could not under these circumstances- but as he cleaved himself to the Veil the physical world fell away. There were more wraiths here, in this part of the Fade, than he’d ever felt in any laboratory, mausoleum, or morgue, and demons too: despair, rage, fear…  
  
_What would you give me, for the power-_ One of those began.

Dorian cut it off. _I’m not here for you._  
  
_Come to me,_ he coaxed the wraiths. _Come to me, and I’ll give you a feast, you’ll grow fatter from my help than you would picking over the leavings of these demons, come-_  
  
Fewer wraiths than he would have thought would have been persuaded come. On the other hand, none of the demons seemed inclined to do more than hiss at a distance, even the one he’d given the brush off to a moment ago. It was curious behavior, the temptation to stay focused upon the Veil and find out what was nearly overwhelming.  
  
And then, very suddenly, he could feel it: a huge, menacing _something_ , bigger and worse than even the fear demons, who he could now perceive were this other demon’s underlings.  
  
_Hello, Dorian,_ it greeted him.  
  
_Goodbye,_ he replied and pulled himself away from the Veil and back into the physical world.  
  
For a moment, he thought he’d done something wrong when he returned. The ogre was standing not ten feet away, one of the retinue clutched in its hand, the rest of the guards stabbing at it. It all had to be very noisy, but it was all muffled under the sound of his pulse beating in his ears.  
  
He didn’t have time for this.  
  
_Come on,_ he coaxed, spirit marks enshrining the fallen darkspawn. _That’s it. Make yourself at home. Remember the way those bodies moved? Now get up, that’s it. Remember how they wanted to kill us? Turn that around. Focus on the big one right in front of me._  
  
“If they’re glowing purple, they’re friendly!” Livia yelled, practically in his ear, and suddenly the sound returned to the world.  
  
It nearly broke his concentration: Dorian redoubled his attention on keeping the wraiths under his control without binding them permanently to their host bodies. He ran through the focusing mantras he’d learned since he was old enough to remember his dreams, again and again, like pearls on a prayer rope.

The swarm of undead darkspawn was more effective than the swarm of Green People had been. They did not tire, felt no pain or fear, and the ogre was confused as to why it was being attacked by by its fellows. It went down with a deafening roar- and where was that muted quality when he needed it?- but that was hardly the end of the fight.

 _Go on then,_ Dorian urged his minions. _Eat your own._  
  
It took several minutes for the surviving Green People to regroup, but the Wardens had managed to mostly hold the perimeter while they’d been scattered, and Dorian was able to direct _his_ darkspawn to take down most of those they’d missed. Once the Green People had managed to form themselves back up and resume shooting, he heard Livia start mutter a chant of her own under her breath, one for speeding the regeneration of mana.  
  
It was disrupting Dorian’s concentration. He fished one of his lyrium potions out from his pouch and handed it to her, wordlessly. Thirty seconds later, they had a static cage protecting them once more, electrocuting shrieks attempting to sneak inside and any other darkspawn who managed to make it past the Warden, still fighting with tireless, ruthless coordination. From this distance, it almost looked pretty.  
  
Finally, finally, after what felt like days but couldn’t have been more than an hour since he’d summoned them, the last of the darkspawn fell and there was no more need to Dorian’s minions.  
  
_Well, I hope you found this instructional,_ he thought, and one by one let them slip back into the Fade.

Livia’s static cage dissipated next, and the Wardens returned to their circle of wagons. The Green Leader intercepted the Warden-Lieutenant, and the pair of them drew off to the side, to where the Green People were laying out their wounded.  
  
Their wounded, and one of Alexius’ retinue, Dorian realized with a jolt. He didn’t know the man’s name.  
  
Two of the guards had perished. He didn’t know their names either.  
  
“Why don’t you sit down, Dorian?” Livia suggested gently.  
  
“That’s a good idea,” Dorian agreed, but he found that he couldn’t move until Felix had settled down on the carriage seat and tugged on Dorian’s hand until he was seated beside him.  
  
“Do you have any more lyrium?” Livia asked.  
  
“Five vials,” Dorian replied.  
  
“Perhaps you should drink one of those now.” Her words were still phrased like a suggestion, but the tone was that of a command.  
Dorian fished out another vial and tossed it back.  
  
“This is… a lot worse than our usual brand of trouble,” Felix said shakily. His hand was still wrapped around Dorian’s.  
  
“Yes,” Dorian agreed. “Much worse.”  
  
Livia settled down on his other side. “Dorian-”  
  
That was as far as she got before a shriek materialized behind her. She yelped and fell off to the side, just barely managing to avoid getting stuck in the process. Felix yelled, bringing his staff blade down on the thing, unable to swing at such an angle as to hit it with enough force to do damage. Dorian’s fire managed it well enough, as did the arrows Harding shot, three bolts burying themselves in its eyes and neck before it toppled over dead.  
  
“ _Vishante kaffas!_ " both he and Felix swore. So did Livia, but she threatened to defile the darkspawn’s tongue with quite a lot more than shit.  
  
Aban ran around the side of the wagon until she had an unobstructed view of them. She didn’t do more than glance at the still-smoldering shriek before letting out a low guttural curse of her own, and raising her staff. Lightning enveloped the caravan, not to strike Dorian (or anyone else as far as he could tell) but coming close enough to have his hairs standing up on end. There was another wail- another _shriek_ from a nearby caravan, and Harding shot again as it came into view.  
  
“My apologies,” she said, cutting off her lightning abruptly. “I should have done that sooner, but it’s unusual for shrieks to lie in wait for longer than it takes to kill their fellows. Are you injured?”  
  
“Just my pride,” Livia said, shooting the pair of them a concerned look.  
  
“I’m fine,” Felix assured her.  
  
“I think I’ve just had ten years of my life frightened away, but apart from that I’m fine as well,” Dorian replied.  
  
“Good,” Aban said, before turning back to Livia. “Magister Alexius, we have things to discuss with Ritmeester Leotrim.”  
  
Livia nodded, and left Dorian and Felix to push the shriek off the wagon and check that the pears were unharmed. The stasis fields still held, but some branches had broken off on the saplings closest to the front.  
  
How long had the shriek been there? How close had it been to him- to Livia, to Felix?

The wagon rocked as Varoujan settled himself on the end. “So. You’re a Mortalitasi? Is that the right word?”  
  
“Not technically,” Dorian replied. “The Mortalitasi are a quirk of Nevarran culture, and perhaps the most Nevarran thing that could be said about me is that my mother has some distant cousins in the Pentaghast clan.”  
  
“Aren’t the Pentaghasts the rulers of Nevarra?” he asked.  
  
“Most noble families are related to some degree. I’m probably related to your king too, though no connection springs readily to mind.”  
  
“For what little he’s worth,” Varoujan said. “The First Warden’s a casteless dwarf from Orzammar. You ain’t related to him.”  
  
“Ah, where did the vaunted apoliticality of the Wardens go?” Dorian asked.  
  
Varoujan snorted, but let the matter drop. “So, if Mortalitasi isn’t the right word-”  
  
“Necromancer,” Dorian told him.  
  
“That sounds… unfriendly.”  
  
“I’m not here to make friends,” Dorian told him. _I’m here because I wanted to avoid my parents,_ he thought. His stomach lurched unpleasantly. “At this point, I’ll settle for making sure the three of us survive this trip. No offense to you or the others.”  
  
“None taken,” Varoujan said. “That’s our job too.”  
  
“And the pears,” Felix added quietly, which was a good point.  
  
“They should be fine, by the way,” Dorian told him. “Livia will have to check them over to be sure, of course.”  
  
“Of course,” Varoujan echoed.  
  
Dorian would have expected that to be the end of it: they’d called him out on his ulterior motives, and generally that was cause for a swift exit. Instead, Varoujan said “Don’t be surprised if the Lieutenant wants to take your measure later. That other horde is still out there.”  
  
“I was trying not to remember that, thank you,” Dorian groaned.  
  
“Don’t,” Varoujan said sharply. “If you want to live- if you want your friends to live- then you have to think about it.”  
  
He clasped Dorian’s shoulder briefly- a startling, unexpected gesture that caused Dorian to blink dumbly at him- and nodded to Felix, and then he left.

* * *

 Sorting out the caravan took the rest of the day and much of the following night as well. There were three oasis within walking distance: three parties were sent out, in the hopes of finding their missing dromedaries, and, with luck, absolutely no darkspawn. There were the injured to tend to, one of the trader’s caravans emptied of its goods and padded with some of the cloth that had been intended for trade to create a sort of sick ward. Livia, a spirit healer before all else, set herself up in that wagon after giving the pears a once over and busied herself with the injured and the dying.  
  
The dead were wrapped in shrouds and set aside for the night, when the cold air would demand a fire anyway. They number seventeen, at first tally: by the time night had fallen and the scouting parties returned with perhaps half the dromedaries they’d lost, the number had risen to a nice even twenty.  
  
“The others are stable,” Livia told them. “It can be difficult to tell with the Blight, of course, but I don’t think we’ll be losing any of the others tonight.”  
  
Dorian nodded. That was something, certainly.  
  
They held the funeral a distance away from the caravan. The Wardens, save for Varoujan, remained behind to guard the injured while the rest of them paid their due to their dead. The Green Leader- Ritmeester was her actual title, apparently- sung a slow dirge in Orth, joined in with her people for a final chorus. They turned to them afterwards: two of the dead were theirs, after all.  
  
Livia turned to her Captain, who shook her head. “No one wants to hear me sing. I’d wake the dead even more quickly thant Master Pavus.”  
  
“That is one challenge I will not be accepting,” Dorian retorted when, naturally, that turned their attention to him.  
  
Felix spared them from further awkwardness by starting in with the High Arcanum version of the Canticle of Ashes. After a moment, Dorian joined in with him. The Order of Argent had been good for something other than sending him caterwauling into the same brothel as Alexius, after all.  
  
That constituted services, apparently. The pyres were lit (the Captain- Maker, Dorian should really know these people’s names- had no qualms about doing that herself) and the Green People, as one, made the sign of the sun disk: touching their right hand to their right shoulder, going over their head, and then touching their left. After a moment, they echoed it with the Tevene version: exactly the same, but using the left hand, and travelling from left to right.  
  
They left the pyres burning, and returned to the caravan. Aban was waiting for them.  
  
“We need to finish our talk from before, Ritmeester, Magister,” she said, before turning to Dorian. “You should come too.”  
  
The Ritmeester followed her without question, but Livia turned to Dorian instead. “You can come, but you don’t have to. She will probably want to discuss you taking a more active role in the fighting, should it come to that.”  
  
“I know. I was warned of that earlier,” Dorian told her.  
  
“You don’t have to go,” Livia repeated.  
  
“You’re not actually our bodyguard, you know,” Felix interjected.  
  
“I might as well consider those duties my own for the duration,” Dorian said. “I’m going to perform them regardless.”  
  
“You don’t have to do that,” Felix insisted.  
  
“Yes, I do,” Dorian refuted. “Come on now , we’ve been over this: I am absolutely _not_ telling your father that I watched one or both of you get eaten by darkspawn. It would utterly destroy him and I’m not sure I’d survive the act.”  
  
“He won’t react any better if we have to tell him _you_ died,” Felix said.  
  
Privately Dorian seriously doubted that. He was hardly going to say anything that might sound like he was was maligning Gereon however, especially not to his wife and son.  
  
“Well, to our very great fortune, I happen to be too pretty to die,” he assured them instead.  
  
Felix did not seem particularly pleased by his words, and Livia sighed, but neither one of them raised another protest as Dorian following the Ritmeester to the Wardens’ wagon.

* * *

 They couldn’t stay camped there for very long. Something about the dead darkspawn and their blood would attract that second large horde like iron filings to a magnet. The particulars of their travel were the subject of this meeting. The lack of dromedaries meant that they were going to have to prioritize which wagons they brought with them. The pears were non-negotiable, as was the sick wagon and the Wardens’ wagon. They needed to take along at least six of their eight condensation collectors, and water would have to be rationed more strictly. They had enough beasts to carry three more wagons, at least one of which was going to have to be mostly emptied to accommodate their gear. The subject of what the remaining two wagons would be carrying was a matter of some debate between the Warden-Lieutenant and the Ritmeester. Leotrim wanted to load them down with the more expensive of their goods, in order to cut down on their losses. Aban wanted one of the carriages to be loaded with the weapons they’d been intending to sell, just in case they had need of extras.  
  
“The Wardens will already pay for the product destroyed by the ogre, and those used to ease the transport of the injured,” Aban said.  
  
“That is generous, but it barely covers half the cost of outfitting my company for the journey to Hossberg, let alone our intended destination of Laysh,” Leotrim replied. “Maximizing the amount of luxury goods we’re carrying is the only way we can possibly break even.”  
  
“We will leave our crest with the wagons,” Aban argued. “It is very likely that you will be able to retrieve them once the horde has past.”  
  
“Yes, because the King’s men do not patrol this close to Hossberg, and would certainly respect the Warden’s claims,” Leotrim retorted.  
  
“Enough,” Livia interjected. “Split one of the wagons between weapons and luxuries. You can still make money off of the arms, can you not?”  
  
“Yes, but-”  
  
“Get us to Hossberg unharmed, and I will pay you a substantial bonus,” Livia said. “You will more than break even, Ritmeester.”  
Leotrim thought her response over, and then nodded, backing down from the argument at last.  
  
“What I’m more interested in knowing is why you invited Dorian here, Warden-Lieutenant,” Livia continued.  
  
Aban turned to him. “You’re a necromancer, correct?”  
  
“That’s me,” Dorian confirmed.  
  
“Both Eram and Magister Alexius described you as a student of thaumaturgy,” she said, with an aside glance in Livia’s direction.  
  
“You say that as though there is nothing wondrous about making the dead get up and walk again,” Dorian retorted. “Nor anything helpful in making them fight for you.”  
  
“I say that because I know that necromancy intersects with thaumaturgy in… shall we say an interesting manner?” Aban said.

Her aside glance was in Leotrim’s direction, but it was clearly meant to make Dorian feel unsettled. He felt no need to oblige her on that account. “I’ve certainly always thought so.” He turned to face Leotrim head on, and gave her one of his most charming smiles. “For most necromancers, the art is a matter of anatomy. Study the way a body moves and fits together, and you can bind a spirit to complete the same motions, even if the body is too decayed to make those motions. The way my mentor and I practice it is slightly different: it’s more a recreation of memory than a recreation of physical actions. There are any number of other differences between the practices, but the effect is much the same, and though it takes more effort to compel them to perform a specific task, the resulting undead minions are far less likely to break from your control and go on an indiscriminate rampage.” And far more likely to stand there, looking bored, if you did not apply sufficient force of will, but that was always the sort of thing that happened to other people, rather than to Dorian.  
  
“There are Mortalitasi in the ranks of the Wardens,” Aban said. “Many of their spells are useful for horde management.”  
  
“I presume that’s Ander for ‘crowd control’?” Dorian asked.  
  
“It’s Warden for ‘crowd control’, yes,” Aban confirmed. “You can raise the dead. What can you do with the still living?”  
  
“I don’t suppose you happen to know whether or not horror spells work on darkspawn?” Dorian asked.  
  
“They do. What about that trick that causes things to explode into gore?”  
  
“The Walking Bomb? I’m proficient, but I must admit that I’ve only ever used that one on lab rats, and once during a particular nasty infestation, robber crabs.” Dorian winced at the memory. “In hindsight, that was probably not the best plan I ever had as it created a very great mess of crab guts which attracted still more crabs, but it still worked.”  
  
“Why only on animals?” Aban asked.  
  
“Well, there’s no point to that spell unless you’re trying to kill a whole horde of things. I don’t exactly go around committing mass murder,” Dorian protested.  
  
“And yet you are comfortable with large numbers of corpses,” Leotrim interjected.  
  
“Yes, they’re used in our work, but we don’t _kill_ people for them,” Dorian said, exasperated. “They’re all executed criminals, or gladiators, or just poor people whose families need money more than a proper funeral, no killing involved.”  
  
“Getting back to the topic at hand,” Livia interrupted, before he could really go on a tear. “Did you merely wish to inquire about Dorian’s talents when you invited him here, Warden-Lieutenant?”  
  
“No, of course not,” Aban replied. “We need to discuss what happens if we encounter the second horde. Having another combat-trained mage might make all the difference between survival and a massacre.”  
  
“Dorian is not trained for combat, he’s an _academic_ ,” Livia retorted, with a surprising amount of anger.  
  
“Dorian would also seem to be comfortable with violence, experienced with killing, and quite capable of learning quickly,” Aban insisted.  
  
Was this some kind of long-standing argument? It certainly seemed that way. But why would they have been arguing about him?  
  
He wasn’t going to get any answers from watching them glower at one another.  
  
“I am also sitting right here,” Dorian reminded them. They both turned to look at him. “Livia, I appreciate your concern, I truly do, but as I have said before I can’t very well go home and tell Gereon that one of you died, and certainly not when I could have done something more.”  
  
Livia nodded curtly, more a minute jerk on her head up than anything else, but said nothing. He turned to Aban next. “During that last fight, it took me a while to figure out how I could use my magic in such close quarters. I presume from your talk of horde management that you have some ideas?”  
  
“Yes,” Aban replied. “Fight with us ahead of the caravan.”

* * *

 Camp had been set up by the time they emerged again. That was camp, singular: the day’s darkspawn had apparently mitigated the animosity of the Green People towards the Tevinters, and they located Felix sitting shoulder to shoulder with Leuthard and one of the archers.  
  
The archer got up and moved when she saw them approach, but only two feet or so to the left, so they could squeeze in. Felix passed them some bowls of stew: Dorian’s was considerably lighter on meat and vegetables than Livia’s was, save for the little beans that tasted like an archdemon’s asshole. There were rather a lot of those.  
  
“Felix, you cannot possibly be cross with me,” Dorian protested, even as Livia tipped some stew from her bowl into his.  
  
“Can’t I?” Felix muttered darkly.  
  
“No, you can’t,” Dorian affirmed. “If our positions were reversed and you were the necromancer rather than the mathematician, you would be doing the exact same thing.” If their positions were reversed, Felix would have likely volunteered before they’d even properly encountered the darkspawn.  
  
“And you would be loudly upset about it,” Felix retorted.  
  
“That’s a fair point,” Dorian conceded, digging in.  
  
He waited until they were all turning in for the night before drawing Livia aside.  
  
“Did you really tell Aban that I was purely an academic?” he asked.  
  
“You _are_ an academic,” Livia pointed out. “You’re an Enchanter at the Circle of Minrathous, you teach classes and assist my husband with his research.”  
  
“I’m also a very accomplished duelist who has been getting into and out of serious altercations since the age of nine,” Dorian said. “You know this. After all the stories Felix has told, I can’t image she didn’t know either, which only leads me to believe that you’ve been actively playing that aspect of me down.”  
  
“Because I don’t want to see you hurt!”  
  
“I can take care of myself,” Dorian argued. “I’ve been doing it for years, since before Gereon and I even met.”  
  
“This isn’t like the sort of trouble you get into in Minrathous,” she hissed. “This isn’t the sort of thing you’re likely to dance out of, or be able to joke about with Felix later.”  
  
“No, but I can certainly make sure we’re all around for later,” Dorian argued. “Livia, I know this is serious, but I can do this. I have no intention of dying, promise.”  
  
Livia pulled him in for a hug, which was only marginally less surprising than being clapped on the shoulder by Varoujan earlier. Impending death made people so touchy, it seemed.  
  
“Please be safe,” she said.  
  
“Well, I’m not running off to battle darkspawn right this second,” Dorian protested. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and avoid them altogether.”

* * *

 They did not get lucky. They were extraordinarily unlucky, and ran into the second horde of darkspawn the following afternoon.  
  
They’d seen the cloud of dust by midmorning. The scouts confirmed the inevitable, and they decided to try and make a break for a buttress they could see to the west: even if they couldn’t all shelter there, perhaps there would be someone with a bow and arrow to divide the darkspawn’s attention, or a place for some of the more mobile wounded. It was a long shot, though, and Dorian wasn’t surprised when they didn’t make it within a mile of the place before Aban called the caravan to a halt.  
  
“That’s me,” Dorian said, pressing two of his remaining vials of lyrium on Livia. “No no, don’t argue. I have others, you need to keep a perimeter up. See you both later.”  
  
That was about as cavalier as he could manage to be. It had been easy to agree to this plan the night before, while he replayed the ogre’s charge and those few terrible moments of sheer uselessness. Now, with another such battle ahead of him, he found that he was quite terrified.  
  
He peeled off to the east with Leuthard, Harding staying at range behind them. To the west, Aban, Lernig and Varoujan were doing much the same. The idea was to try and divide the horde’s attention, and allow the Green People the chance to thin out their ranks from the middle before pressing them back together.  
  
They waited. The sun was hot and the sound of approaching darkspawn growing ever louder as they came into clearer view.  
  
“How are you holding up?” Leuthard asked.  
  
“Well, I haven’t shit my pants yet,” Dorian replied.  
  
“Always a good thing.”  
  
There was a different sort of darkspawn in the horde approaching them than Dorian had yet seen. It was not an ogre but one that towered over its fellows nonetheless, dressed in what looked like tattered Circle robes and moving like it was floating rather than walking. It pointed directly at their caravan and shouted something. It was still too far away to make out what, exactly, but the cadence was that of words.  
  
“What the fuck is that?” Dorian asked.  
  
“They’ve got an emissary!” shouted Leuthard, clearly more to alert the others than to answer Dorian’s question.  
  
Sure enough, he could hear the Warden-Lieutenant’s cursing “ _As-eb vashe-qalab!_ ” over the din of the surviving Green People forming their lines and notching their arrows. The remaining members of their personal retinue had already fallen into step behind the pear wagon, where Livia and Felix stood.  
  
“What the fuck’s an emissary?” he asked.  
  
No one answered him, so he tried again. “Warden Leuthard, what-”  
  
“An emissary is a darkspawn mage,” the Warden told him, fear thickening his Marcher’s burr to the point where Dorian was beginning to have trouble picking apart his words again. “They are thinking, intelligent creatures, and they can direct the horde.”  
  
Dorian wasted three of what might be the last seconds of his life to stare at the elf in disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he checked.  
  
“No,” Leuthard answered curtly, his shield already braced for impact and his mace held ready to swing.  
  
The Green People shot first, their first volley arching smoothly through the air to cut down part of the first line of charging genlocks. Livia’s static cage sparked to life around the whole of the caravan, and Dorian followed suit with personal ones around himself, Harding, and Leuthard.  
  
Dorian kept his eyes on the emissary- couldn’t peel them away from it, in truth. It directed the horde, Leuthard said? Well then, killing it would likely be instrumental to their survival, and Dorian had some small experience in killing other mages.  
  
He just had to survive the other darkspawn first.  
  
“Pavus,” Leuthard said, and Dorian tore his gaze away to look at him. “Good luck.”  
  
Dorian managed a tight smile in reply and the Green People let their second volley fly. “ _Na via lerno victoria_ , Warden Leuthard.”  
  
And then the first line of the darkspawn were upon them, and Dorian had no breath to waste on words.

* * *

 It must have happened sometime during that battle. He would later go over and over it in his mind, trying to pinpoint the exact time it had happened.  
  
It could have been when that arrow grazed his leg: no more than an irritating scrape which barely bled at all, but being shot with a blighted arrow, no matter how glancing, could have had consequences. Even if the disease hadn’t entered him from the arrow itself, he’d fought with the wound open for hours. There had been plenty of opportunities for the taint to spread.  
  
It also could have happened when he’d brought his staffblade down on the carteroid artery of a hurlock. The temptation to use his lyrium had been strong, when he’d first started running low on mana, but there had hardly been a break for him to take out a vial, and with so many darkspawn still left… he’d made the decision that as long as he could still cast barriers, he would simply rely upon focusing mantras and his staffblade. His barrier had fallen just before he managed the killing blow, and infected blood had sprayed everywhere. It had gotten on his face. It had gotten in his mouth.  
  
It had probably not happened when Leuthard died, but he couldn’t help but replay that part too. He’d run complete dry, and Livia was apparently faring little better: her static cage had fallen, and Aban was calling for them to retreat back inside the caravan.  
  
“Do you still have lyrium?” Leuthard snapped.  
  
“Yes, but-”  
  
“For Andraste’s sake, use it, I’ll cover you!”  
  
He’d turned his attention from the battle for only a moment. For just long enough to fish the vial out. When he looked back up Leuthard had been gutted by a shriek. He hadn’t made a sound, but Maker, the way Harding had _screamed_ …  
  
Of course, it was entirely possible that he’d managed to avoid the Blight entirely until he had a genlock clawing its way up his back. But by the time Aban’s group arrived and Varoujan shot it off him, he was certainly done for.  
  
“Leuthard’s dead,” Dorian told them.  
  
“I know,” Aban replied, shoving him behind the nearest wagon for cover. “If any of us are going to survive this, we need to take out that emissary.”  
  
“How?” Dorian demanded. The emissary had stayed behind it’s horde for the most part, keeping them too engaged with its underlings to attack it directly, even as it rained its spells down upon them.  
  
“We’re just going to have to let the others take care of the regular darkspawn,” Aban said grimly. “And run straight for the emissary ourselves.”  
  
Dorian risked a peak around the edge of the wagon. “We’re not going to make that,” he reported.  
  
“Some of us might,” Aban said. “It’s our only chance.”  
  
Dorian looked, involuntarily, towards Felix and Livia. The darkspawn had reached their wagon, and were fighting with the remainder of their retinue. Livia was throwing bolts of lightning down into the melee: Felix was knocking back any darkspawn that clambered up the wagon, but it couldn’t hold for very long.  
  
In all likelihood, they would be dead before anyone reached the emissary, even supposing someone could make it that far. They would be dead, and most if not all of the Green People would be too. There simply wasn’t enough _time_.

Dorian got out his last vial of lyrium and knocked it back. “Actually, I have a better idea.” He planted his staff on the ground. “Everyone hold on to this. One hand will do.”  
  
“Uh,” Varoujan said.  
  
“If this works, I’ll be happy to explain later,” Dorian said. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll know in a minute, and can go commit suicide as per the Warden-Lieutenant’s plan.”  
  
“Do as he says,” Aban commanded, one grey hand already wrapped tightly around his staff near the top. They all piled in, dubious but obedient, and Dorian focused.  
  
He’d never cast this spell outside of laboratory conditions, and could count with the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d cast it without Gereon’s supervision. Still, they had never intended for this to be the sort of spell that was performed only under the most controlled of circumstances. It was always meant to be used out in the field.  
  
Dorian had never quite gotten around to telling Gereon about this, but he’d always thought that it would be used on the battlefield, specifically. He couldn’t help but think it: he’d grown up in Qarinus, a stone’s throw from Seheron. He was the son of Magister Pavus, one of the war’s biggest supporters. It seemed the logical conclusion, that their work would be used in such a fashion.  
  
Admittedly, he hadn’t expected that it would be used to benefit a Qunari, even a Vashoth Qunari, but here they were.  
  
“What the fuck?” Varoujan demanded.  
  
Dorian opened his eyes. All around them the din of the melee had fallen away, replaced by a deep rumbling more vibration than sound. Arrows tottered through the air at a snail’s pace: people moved so slowly that they might as well have been standing still.  
  
“Short answer: time magic,” Dorian told them curtly. He spared a glance down: yes, there were glyphs beneath each of their feet, and from this cursory angel they looked correct. “I helped invent it.”

Lernig made the sign of the sundisk with her free hand.  
  
“If you could take your hand off my staff and then step away, one at a time please?” he asked.  
  
They did so, Varoujan fairly leaping away at the first chance he was given. Harding went last, cautiously. No one burst into flames, froze into a block of ice, or appeared to be experiencing any discomfort. Dorian was tentatively willing to call this first field trial a success, provided they didn’t all die of darkspawn first.  
  
Lernig had moved several feet away, and to where an arrow was about to hit one of the Green People. She plucked it out of the air, snapped the shaft in half, and tossed it away. “I like this,” she said.  
  
“Well, I’ve never cast this spell under these sorts of conditions before, so I don’t know how long I can maintain it,” Dorian told them. “Now would be an excellent time to make that run at the emissary.”  
  
Aban nodded. She, Harding and Varoujan stepped around to take a clear shot at the thing, while Lernig charged ahead, making brutal yet efficient work of the lesser darkspawn in her way from the sound of it. Dorian focused on maintaining the spell for as long as he could.

When he could feel his mana beginning to run low again, he called out “Is it dead yet?”  
  
“Just a few moments more,” Aban replied.  
  
“You’ve got maybe two minutes,” Dorian told her. “ _Maybe_.”  
  
She raised her staff and a sweep of lightning ran through the caravan, exposing a good half-dozen shrieks. Lernig returned to her comrade’s side, splattered with black blood and looking invigorated.  
  
Lucky her.  
  
“You can dispel your magic now, Pavus,” Aban told him.

It wasn’t a matter of dispelling magic so much as letting them sink back into the natural progression of things, a gradual lessening of the hold of the glyph’s he’d constructed over them until they were no longer needed. The sound gradually returned, people began gradually moving, and just before the spell had ended, he twirled his staff and used most of the remainder of his mana to set a wall of fire up between the pear wagon and the bulk of the darkspawn attacking it.  
  
They snapped back into the usual flow of time a little more roughly than usual, possibly as a result of that. Dorian could not bring himself to care. To his delight, it turned out that his fire spell carried with it the momentum from the time dilation: it must have looked like an instantaneous manifestation. Furthermore, even he could tell the darkspawn were less coordinated, and some of them even seemed to be retreating, lost without their master.  
  
It was the work of moments, to clean up the remaining darkspawn. The work of moments, to fight his way back to Livia and Felix.  
  
There were only two members of their retinue still standing. Livia was conferring with them, as Felix swung down from the carriage to meet him.  
  
“Are you alright?” he asked.  
  
“I’m fine. See? I told you so,” Dorian said, though he probably looked a frightful mess. “How are you holding up?”  
  
“I am going to have nightmares for the rest of my life,” Felix told him, with a strained little laugh.  
  
“Aren’t we all?” Dorian replied.  
  
They waited a moment, watching Livia talk things over.  
  
“Oh, I’m not sure if you noticed, but I conducted the first successful field test of that spell your father and I have been working on,” Dorian said.  
  
“I noticed you did _something_ ,” Felix replied. “Maker, it’s not just a theory anymore, is it. Actual, applicable chronomancy, and you invented it.”  
  
“Gereon may have something to say to that,” Dorian pointed out.  
  
The point appeared to go over Felix’s head. “The Archon might just make you a magister for that, you know. One in your own right, as opposed to your inherited title.”  
  
“Can you imagine? Father’s head would explode.”  
  
Father. Maker, what would his father say when he learned of all this? He would be concerned about Dorian’s wellbeing, that went without saying, but would he let it show? Would he be proud of what Dorian had done, or would he still be angry at the breach of protocol that had gotten him into the Anderfels in the first place?  
  
“Dorian?”  
  
Dorian found he was listing to the side, and managed, mostly, to turn it into a casual lean against the side of the wagon.  
  
“You know what? I think I fancy a nap,” Dorian managed, and keeled over.

* * *

 He woke up tucked neatly beneath a blanket in their tent, his wounds healed, and his ripped trousers gone. A fresh pair was folded over the pack at the end of the bedroll: he pulled them on, and then his boots and cloak, and then he went outside.  
  
_Mana exhaustion._ That’s what Livia said, when she and Felix had noticed him and all but crushed him between them. _You should be fine, now that you’ve rested._  
  
Dorian nodded, because he felt fine.  
  
They’d set up camp under the auspices of the homestead they’d been trying to reach earlier. Scouting parties had been sent to retrieve the dromedaries, and they appeared to have had more success with finding their missing beasts of burden the second go around than they’d had the first- they didn’t seem to be missing any more of them, that was. The sun had set, and they had already held the funeral services. The bodies were just now burning to ash, the flames maintained by tumbleweeds and, probably, Aban’s mana.  
  
Warden Leuthard had been given a place of honor, his body on its own pyre in the front of the two groups used for the members of their retinue and the Green People. The Wardens themselves stood vigil over it, Harding crying silently as she watched.  
  
“He died well, fighting darkspawn,” Dorian said quietly, coming to stand next to Aban. She nodded in reply, so he continued with “If that’s the best you can hope for, I don’t envy you.”  
  
The look Aban gave him was unreadable. He would later return to the memory of it, and try to parse it out: Did she know? Could she sense the corruption within him? Did she suspect, or was she as ignorant of it as he? Had she held her tongue because she hadn’t wanted him to be frightened off of the prospect of becoming a Warden?  
  
“Could you always cast that spell?” Harding asked, not looking away from the fire.  
  
“Not really,” Dorian said. “That’s the first time it’s been performed outside of laboratory conditions. And even when the environment is controlled, things might still go wrong. The pocket of time dilation might not have stabilized correctly, and caused pain, or even some manner of injury, amongst other, less savory side effects. We still haven’t pinned down all the variables involved with casting it successfully. If the situation had been any less dire, in all likelihood I would have rushed for the emissary with you instead of attempting to cast it.”  
  
“But you can stop time,” Varoujan insisted.  
  
“No,” Dorian told him. “What I can do is, for a short while, create a small mobile field of time dilation, which allows for anyone within said field to perceive the world as though it were moving slowly, while actually just experiencing the flow of time at an accelerated rate.”  
  
Varoujan blinked at him.  
  
“I didn’t stop time, I just made us go very, very fast relative to the rest of the world,” Dorian clarified. “Which I know sounds less impressive than making time stop, but I assure you, it’s considered by many to be just as impossible.”  
  
“So you can’t make time stop,” Aban said.  
  
“Not yet,” Dorian told her. “It might one day be possible to create a sort of stasis field that cuts off someone from the flow of time completely, but it certainly wouldn’t be very big.”  
  
“Can you go back?” Harding asked.

“No,” Dorian said firmly. “As far as we can tell, time travel really _is_ impossible, and even if it weren’t… Maker, what a mess that could make of things.”  
  
The Wardens exchanged looks, again unreadable, again something he couldn’t help but look back upon. Were they thinking of what they could do with that kind of magic? Were they thinking that it was good that he’d been infected, because surely that meant that he would be joining their ranks?  
  
At the time, he didn’t attach any kind of sinister motives to them. They had, after all, just survived against impossible odds. He rather thought that made them comrades of a sort.  
  
“Come on,” Aban said, after Leuthard’s body had been reduced to ash and the fire had been allowed to die down. “The family that owns this place has promised to break out the chalbat.”  
  
“What’s chalbat?” Dorian asked. “Something alcoholic, I presume.”  
  
There was a round of laughter from the Wardens. Even Harding managed a weak chuckle.  
  
“Tell you what,” Aban said. “If you can finish a pint of it, I’ll tell you what it’s made from."

* * *

 He thought it was food poisoning at first.  
  
He put the fatigue down to the after-effects of the battle and the punishing pace they were moving at in order to place it behind them. He put the headaches down to the Void-awful Anderfel drink Aban had given him and the restrictive water rations. But when the vomiting started the following evening, he knew he was sick.  
  
He just thought it was food poisoning.  
  
“You know,” he ground out, waiting to see if he’d managed to empty his stomach and it just felt like he’d be throwing up his upper intestines next. “I’m really beginning to regret coming on this trip.”  
  
“You say that like you wouldn’t be throwing up if you were in Qarinus,” Felix rejoined with forced levity, gingerly holding Dorian’s robes away from the sick.  
  
“Yes, but that would be because I’d had too much wine and rich foods, not because I’d had any quantity of curdled yak milk or whatever that chalbat nonsense was.”  
  
He straightened up, evidentially not cautiously enough, and immediately doubled over again, retching into the parched earth.  
  
Felix made a sympathetic noise. A few feet away, Lernig tapped her spade anxiously against the hilt of her sword. The Anderfels were apparently so devoid of food that animals would be attracted to the scent of his vomit unless it was buried- or so he’d been told. It was possible that the precautions were merely another sign that they’d known he was infected.  
  
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here,” Felix said.  
  
“Felix,” Dorian said, trying not to whine and failing miserably in the endeavor. “If this is the sort of activity you enjoy, I really don’t care to know that about you.”  
  
“You know what I mean,” Felix huffed. “We might be dead, if you weren’t here. We certainly would have lost the pears.”  
  
Dorian glared blearily up at him. “Don’t even joke about that, Felix.”

“What, the pears?”  
  
Dorian continued to glare.  
  
“I’m not joking,” Felix replied, and handed him his water canteen. “You probably saved the whole caravan.”  
  
“Much as I enjoy hearing my praises sung,” Dorian managed, before doubling over again and retching.  
  
A day of only marginal success in keeping anything down later, Dorian collapsed. After that, they thought it was dysentery.  
  
Livia used every trick she knew to keep him hydrated and attempt to purge the disease from his system. The result was something like a perpetual case of the runs, which he might have found mortifying had he been lucid enough to be embarrassed. He wasn’t. There were a few moments of blessed relief when scarf-wrapped ice was pressed to his forehead and cool water trickled down his throat and the rest was a haze of burning, as though his blood was turning to acid in his veins.  
  
And then it happened. He wasn’t sure of the difference at first, merely that he felt sharper than he had in a long time. He wondered vaguely if that meant that he was finally getting better.  
  
That was when he first heard the noise, like nails on a pane of glass.  
  
“What’s that sound?” he rasped.  
  
“What sound?” Felix asked.  
  
The pane of glass in this metaphor was his brain.

The noise reached a sudden fever pitch, and Dorian clamped his hands over his ears with a groan of pain. That seemed to only make the noise louder- he could barely hear Felix calling for Livia over the din.  
  
“I think he’s having some kind of fit,” Felix explained.  
  
_Kill them._ It wasn’t as though the noise had become words, as that would presume that it became less cacophonous. It hadn’t- it was now merely cacophony with intent. _Kill them, kill them, killthem, killthem killthem killthem killthemkillthemkillthemkillthemkill-_  
  
Though it probably came from right outside the wagon, he still heard the cry from far away. “Darkspawn!”  
  
Dorian rather abruptly understood what was happening. A knife in the ribs probably would have been easier to take.  
  
“Hit me,” he managed to hiss out from between his teeth.  
  
“Dorian, what-” Felix jumped slightly. Dorian felt it, rather than saw it, as he had his hands pressed over his eyes, his fingers gripped at his hair tightly enough that thought he could feel his scalp tearing.  
  
“Back of the head.” _Kill them._ “Knock me out.” _Tear them limb from limb._ “Quickly.” _Sink your teeth into their flesh._ “Please, Felix, I can’t-”  
  
Livia took care of it: one swift blow from her staff and for a blessedly long time there was nothing but darkness and a lack of sound exactly where it should be.

* * *

 He woke up in the sick wagon. Or, as he was beginning to realize it actually was, quarantine.  
  
“The Wardens have some herbs which they think might help control your symptoms,” Livia told him. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. She wouldn’t tell him what disease his symptoms pointed to- though, it wasn’t as though she had to. “Are they working?”  
  
“Well, I can think again and I'm not hearing any voices,” Dorian reported. “I still sort of feel like shit that’s been scraped off of someone’s boot heel, though.”  
  
“Try to get some rest,” Livia told him.  
  
He tried. Sometimes he even succeeded, if only because there was so little else to do: the Wardens stopped by with their food and medicine, and just to chat; the Green People had a healer who checked them over and brought out the bodies of any who died, and Livia stopped in once a day. Felix didn’t visit. Probably, he was forbidden from doing so, and Livia must be very adamant that he stay away, considering how much trouble the man would cheerfully walk into under normal circumstances.  
  
So Dorian rested, or feigned rest, listening to his fellow infectees cough and whisper about their chances with the Wardens and resolutely did not think about the disease they must all surely have.  
  
That lasted only until three nights before they arrived at the Circle of Magi. That night he woke up and knew, instantly that something was wrong. It wasn’t that no one was snoring or coughing for once. It wasn’t anything physical. He simply knew something had changed, and not for the better.  
  
He sat up, cautiously, taking stock: the first thing he noticed was that he was not the only one up. One of the Green People, Stefan, was also awake, crouching on the floor by his bunk.  
  
He was also, Dorian realized before he had even gotten a good look at his face, what was wrong. Then Stefan turned towards him, drawn to the movement, and let out an inhuman screech.  
  
He lunged towards Dorian’s bunk. Adrenaline course through him, and he was able to get a barrier up before he attacked, but Stefan kept clawing at him, at the barrier around him, heedless of the bellowing of the others as they called for help. Some chucked there shoe at him. Someone else tried to ensnare him in their blanket. It made no difference to Stefan, who was single-minded in his assault. It couldn’t have lasted longer than a minute, but it felt like hours passed before Dorian managed to get enough leverage to push back.  
  
He managed to stand as well, but couldn’t maintain his balance, not with Stefan still attempting to claw him to bits: they fell through the canvas flap that served as the entrance and exit into the wagon, and out onto the rocky sand.  
  
The camp had already come alive around them. Harding wasn’t the closest, but she was the quickest with her bow and arrow. Stefan slumped over, dead, impaled through the eye: Dorian pushed until he was no longer pinned the weight of his body.  
  
It was then that he got his first real look at what Stefan had become. They were all, Dorian included, looking worse for wear: their features had pinched, their skin had gone sallow, and their eyes had sunk into their skulls. The rictus twist of Stefan’s features was not so very far away from that, even as it looked far from human.  
  
_Ah,_ Dorian thought dazedly. _So that’s what a ghoul looks like._  
  
He allowed Livia to usher him back into the wagon, and to tuck him back into his bunk, pointedly ignoring the others and their murmurs in mingled Trade and Orth. He waited until she was gone, and then turned on his side, drawing his knees up to his chest. He cried.

* * *

 Felix came to visit him the next day.  
  
“You shouldn’t be here,” Dorian told him.  
  
“Yes, I should,” Felix insisted. “Where else could I possibly be, when you’re…”  
  
He pressed his lips together and gestured sharply to where Dorian had, with a depressing amount of effort, managed to sit halfway-upright on his bunk.  
  
Mindful of the dozen or so people still alive and listening, Dorian switched to Tevene to say “You could get ill.”  
  
“If I didn’t catch the Blight from fighting darkspawn, I’m certainly not going to catch it from keeping you company on your sickbed,” Felix replied.  
  
It was the first time anyone had actually said the word ‘Blight’ to him, and it must have showed on his face.  
  
“They did tell you it’s the Blight, right?” Felix asked.  
  
“Not as such, no,” Dorian replied. “It’s been a bit difficult to miss, however.”  
  
“Maker,” Felix said, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry, Dorian.”

For a moment, that was it. Felix merely stood there, as Jehona in the bunk below Dorian’s had yet another coughing jag and Anton on the bunk above his shifted.  
  
“I know the popular view in this country seems to be ‘blame Tevinter’,” Dorian said at last. “But you can hardly be held responsible for the Blight, Felix.”  
  
“I invited you here,” Felix said quietly.  
  
“And I accepted,” Dorian was swift to reply. “I decided that darkspawn were preferable company to my parents. That was me.”  
  
“Oh Dorian- your parents,” Felix said, stricken. “What are we going to tell them?”  
  
“Tell them that I was such an ardent shirker of my duties that I hopped the border headlong into a horde of darkspawn, and that they can console themselves with the fact that it was all my own fault.”  
  
“ _Dorian!_ ”  
  
“That’s what they’ll say, regardless. You might as well take credit for the trend.”  
  
“Oh, Dorian…” Felix’s voice was cracking again. Indeed, he sounded very close to tears.  
  
“Felix, no, don’t start crying,” Dorian told him. “If you start crying, then I’m going to start crying. I’m a very ugly crier, and I shudder to think what I might look like considering the lack of attention I’ve paid to my appearance of late. I absolutely forbid you from taking the last of my beauty away.”  
  
The wet choking noise Felix made in response was clearly supposed to be a laugh. Dorian smiled in response, and found that he was getting tired simply from propping himself up on his elbows. He let himself flop back onto the bunk.  
  
“Does it hurt?” Felix asked.  
  
“A little,” Dorian said. “Not like it was before. It aches more than hurts. The pain’s there, but whatever the Wardens have been giving us dulls it, I think. Either that or I’m too tired to hurt.”  
  
“I should let you rest.”  
  
Dorian’s eyes had closed without his permission. He forced them open again.  
  
“You don’t have to. I mean, as long as you’re here already,” he said quickly. “I’ve been cooped up here for days, and it’s frightfully dull.”  
  
“It’s frightfully dull without you out there, too,” Felix told him. “Well. There was something of an incident with some of the Green People yesterday. Lashin- she’s one of the archers- woke up and found that someone had left a dead rattlesnake on her tent. That apparently means something related to courting in Anders, but she’s actually sharing that tent with four other women, and they weren’t sure who the love token was intended for, much less who it was from. And then Arik tried to take credit for it, even though it turned out he hadn’t killed the rattlesnake, but…”  
  
Dorian drifted off to the sound of Felix’s voice in his ears, a tiny pocket of normalcy in an otherwise horrific situation.  
  
How often did they do this: one of them speaking of the days’ inanities, while the either merely lay there, and listened or dozed, each content that their trust in the other was sound? Quite often, especially now that Felix was home from studying in Orlais for good.  
  
And here was a question which he now had to contemplate: who would Felix do this with when Dorian was no longer there?

* * *

 A curious thing happened on that last leg of their journey, in between Stefan turning into a ghoul and their arrival at Hossberg’s Circle of Magi: Dorian developed something of a sixth sense. Possibly he had been developing it before, but it didn’t become apparent until he had stopped trying so very hard not to put a name to his disease.  
He had the Blight. He had been infected with the corrupted taint of darkspawn. And, apparently, that would do more to him than just kill him.  
  
He could sense it within the others now: those laying sick beside him, and in the small groups of darkspawn that harried the caravan over the next few days. He could sense it in the Wardens too: different, more contained, but still very present.  
  
_The darkspawn can tell their own from the taint, indeed,_ Dorian thought sourly, recalling the first mate’s words. They pulled up in the shadow of the Circle of Magi- carved from stone, but looking less like the buttresses they’d been passing and more like Weisshaupt Fortress- and Dorian could tell that there were other Wardens awaiting their arrival long before the cry of “It’s the High Constable!” went out.  
  
Felix and Livia helped him out of the sick wagon and into his formal robes. By the time he was as presentable as he was going to get, the gates to the Circle had opened, and the High Constable had strode into camp.  
  
She was reuniting with Aban- who was her wife, from the look of things. Livia and Felix politely averted their eyes as the two women kissed. Dorian did not bother trying to keep his eyes away. It would have made no difference even if he had. He could almost feel the way they pressed together, could almost taste how their pulses were racing.  
  
He might have been imagining that, however. It distracted him from the bone-deep ache he was carrying with him.  
  
When they pulled away from one another, Aban leant down and whispered something into the High Constable’s ear. Dorian couldn’t tell what was said, but whatever it was, it meant that when the elf approached them she wore a mask of complete professionalism.  
  
The first thing Dorian noticed was that her face was tattooed with feathers, a match for the vitaar Aban wore, and that she also had a fang necklace displayed prominently among her Warden’s regalia. The second thing he noticed was that she was rather tall for an elven woman, standing only an inch or so shorter than he would on a normal day when slouching was impermissible. She had a greatsword slung over her back: had she been of normal height, it would have dwarfed her, but as it was it was merely comically large.  
  
Dorian had no doubt that she could use it, and use it well.  
  
“Magister Alexius,” she greeted them. Her Orlesian accent was as profound as Leuthard’s Starkhaven brogue had been. “I am High Constable Sidona Andras.”  
  
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Livia replied. “I am Magister Livia Alexius, this is my son, Felix of House Alexius-”  
  
“Enchanté, madam,” Felix said with a careful bob of his head.  
  
“And my husband’s apprentice, Dorian of House Pavus.”  
  
“I presume you’re here to confirm that it doesn’t just _feel_ like I’m dying of the Blight,” Dorian replied.

“Among other things,” Andras said. Behind her, the rest of the sick wagon was being unloaded, the blighted Green People helped by their fellows into the Circle’s embrace.  
  
“My wife was rather impressed with your work,” Andras continued.  
  
“She should be,” Dorian said. “My work is very impressive.”  
  
Andras smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “Impressive, bordering upon impossible, from the sound of things.”  
  
“I try my hardest, certainly.”  
  
Andras snorted. “Let me be blunt, then: you are going to die, and it will not be a pleasant death. It will be lingering and painful, and you will be a danger to any who surround you before your end. But there is a way out.”  
  
“No,” Livia said urgently, her hand squeezing his shoulder.  
  
“No?” Dorian repeated, rounding on her in surprise. Surely she didn’t want him to die? He certainly couldn’t think of anything he’d done to provoke that reaction.  
  
“No?” said Andras as well, though she said it in a very different tone.  
  
“High Constable, the work the Wardens do is both necessary and noble, but surely there is no need for Dorian to do it,” Livia protested.  
  
“From all accounts, he is both an able fighter and a practitioner of impossible arts,” Andras rejoined. “The Wardens could use a man like that.”  
  
“Many people could. That does not necessarily mean that they should make use of him.”  
  
“You understand, of course, that I can force the issue?”  
  
“As the ranking Warden, you do hold the right of conscription, true. But I hold the right to distribute my pears to the Anderfels, I hold the right of negotiation with the King your Order seeks to depose, I hold the right, as a Magister, to offer the Imperium’s aide in the event of such a catastrophe. Would you like to test your rights against mine?”  
  
“He will die without our aid,” Andras all but snarled. “Have you ever seen a man die of the Blight? It does not matter how strong they were to start with, or how powerful. Their end is pitiable, all the same.”  
  
“And to secure your aide, he must join your Wardens? Permanently?” Livia demanded.  
  
“It is the price we have all paid, Magister. I cannot make an exception, not even for your ward, not even if I wanted to.”  
  
“And I cannot allow you to force him into anything.”  
  
“If I could interject for a moment to point out that I’m not dead yet?” Dorian said. “Nor have I gone deaf, for that matter.”  
  
Livia gave his shoulder another squeeze. Andras looked down at him where he was sitting propped up against Felix’s side for balance on the back of the pear wagon.  
  
“Do you feel well enough to walk?” she asked him.  
  
“If it’s not too far,” Dorian replied.  
  
“Then let’s go for a walk,” she said.  
  
“But-” Livia began.  
  
“I give you my word, Magister Alexius, that I will not exercise the right of conscription upon him. If he joins the Grey Wardens it will be due to his own decision.”  
  
Livia squeezed his shoulder a third time, and then let go.  
  
“Very well,” Dorian agreed, and stood.

* * *

As promised, Andras did not take him very far, but she did take him up two flights of stairs, which just about taxed him to his limit. She leaned against a window ledge, the lowest opening in the outermost wall that surrounded the Circle, which gave him an excuse to do the same, and catch his breath.  
  
“This used to be a fertile land, you know,” she said.  
  
“I’d read as much in history books,” Dorian replied, still somewhat out of breath. “I don’t believe there’s anyone left alive to carry the memory of it.”  
  
She laughed. Dorian raised an eyebrow at the sound.  
  
“Sorry,” she apologized. “You just reminded me of my grandfather. He used to say that people perceived things as much through memory as they did through sight or touch, and unlike the other five senses, memories could be handed down.”  
  
Dorian was a bit too exhausted to make anything of that, and remained silent.  
  
Andras sighed slightly, turning her attention back to the window. “Perhaps it is an elf thing.”  
  
“I don’t think so, but if you expect something remotely comprehensible on the subject then you shall have to wait until such time as I am less preoccupied with dying,” Dorian said.  
  
“Fair enough,” she allowed. “There is only one way for that to happen, you know. You must join the Grey Wardens.”  
  
“Must I?” Dorian said, with all the contempt he could muster.  
  
“Yes,” Andras said, refusing to take the bait of his tone. “You must.”

Dorian said nothing, a more deliberate silence than before.  
  
“It would be to your own benefit, for more reasons than just your mere survival,” Andras added, after a moment for the lack of a response to grow decidedly frosty. “The Wardens operate outside the bounds of society- of all societies but our own. You would not be subject to the prejudice against mages that is so common in Andrastean lands. Nor would you be subject to the societal constraints of your homeland.”  
  
“But I would be subject to the Warden’s constraints, whatever those might be,” Dorian pointed out.  
  
“Yes. But those are relatively uncomplicated. Fight darkspawn. Kill as many as you can. The rest can be sorted out later.”  
  
_Liar_ , Dorian thought, but did not say. The Wardens were more deeply involved in politics than anyone should be comfortable with, especially here in the Anderfels. Especially here, in the land where darkspawn still routinely roamed away from the Deep Roads even when there were no Blights, where the king was weak and the people fearful.  
  
They had a cure. She had not denied that. But whatever it was, they would not give it to anyone who would not pledge themselves to the Wardens indefinitely.  
  
“It’s for your own good,” Andras pressed.  
  
That settled it, then. “I’m afraid I must decline.”  
  
“Then you will die.”  
  
“Perhaps,” Dorian replied, but he was already planning. They should be able to come up with some sort of treatment based upon the herbs the Wardens had been giving them, perhaps improve up them. Once he was no longer travelling he would be able to regain some of his strength, and then he could begin to get to work.  
  
There was a cure. If the Wardens had it, then he could certainly discover it for himself. Discover it, improve upon it, maybe even weaponize it for use against the darkspawn themselves. Gereon could be talked around to hosting him while he worked, maybe even helping him, he was sure. Who wouldn’t want to say that they’d mentored the man who’d beaten the Blight?  
  
“Then again, perhaps not.”  
  
The walk down the stairs was almost as draining as the walk up had been. He managed it through sheer stubbornness, more than anything else, and collapsed on their wagon as soon as he could.  
  
“You’re back,” Felix observed. “Are you… staying?”  
  
“I should hope not. If I never see this blighted wasteland again it will be too soon,” Dorian replied.  
  
“Good,” Livia replied, taking one of his hands and squeezing it briefly. “I’ll have a word with the Ritmeester. Given that we are not unharmed I will not be giving her that bonus we discussed, but I think if I offer it in return to safe passage back to Tallo she’ll accept.”  
  
Dorian nodded, and then, without meaning to, nodded off.

* * *

 “You have a visitor, Magister Alexius."  
  
Those were the innocuous words, spoken by his butler, that signaled the arrival of real trouble into House Alexius. At the time, he’d thought nothing of it. People were visiting him often, these days: it was known that his wife was the more politically minded of the two of them, and with her out of the country, they hoped to trick him into doing something foolish. More fool them, for thinking he could be goaded into making such decisions without consulting his wife.  
  
He took his time putting away his devices, and let them wait. He regretted it the moment he entered the receiving room and saw the blue-and-silver robes of the Grey Wardens.  
  
“Magister Alexius,” she said gently, far too gently. “I’m Warden-Commander Leonie Caron. I’m not sure if you remember me- we’ve met at functions at the Arcanist Hall?”  
  
“Yes,” Gereon said woodenly. There was, after all, only one reason why she would be here. “I know who you are.”  
  
He and Dorian had both met with her several times, and she’d met with Livia even more often, given the work Livia did. She’d spoken with Felix on at least one occasion: she was an Orlesian by birth, and had studied at the same Circle as the current Empress’ Court Enchanter. Felix had been rather hoping for tales, and had been disappointed to learn that Caron had barely met the woman, and vehemently disagreed with her politics from afar.  
  
In the here and now, Caron paused. “Perhaps you should sit down, Magister,” she suggested.  
  
It was a sensible suggestion, but Gereon found that his legs had locked together, and he couldn’t move. Therefore, logically, he could not sit down and be told that his family was dead.  
  
“The news is not as bad as it could be, Magister,” she told him.  
  
“Ah,” Gereon said, and forced himself over the threshold and onto the settee.  
  
“I should start, I think, by informing you that while most the retinue you… retained have died, your family and apprentice are still alive.”  
  
“Oh.” And just like that, Gereon could breathe again. “What happened?”

“There was an attack on the caravan your family were travelling with. Darkspawn. It took a terrible toll on the caravan, but your wife and son escaped unscathed.”  
  
“So it’s Dorian you’re here about, then?” he asked. _Better than the alternatives,_ he thought, and immediately wished to take the thought back. His apprentice deserved better.  
  
“Yes,” Caron replied. “As I said, he is still alive, but during the fighting he was injured, and he became infected with the Blight.”  
  
The bottom fell out of his stomach. “He’s one of yours now, I take it?” That meant that he’d lost the only able apprentice he’d been able to find, Felix had lost a friend, and someone was going to have to tell Halward Pavus that he had lost his heir. That meant that Dorian was never going to be able to come home.  
  
Maker, what a mess. Dorian wasn’t even supposed to have been on that trip originally.  
  
“No, actually. He refused to join the Wardens, and it was deemed impolitic to attempt to conscript him,” Caron explained.  
  
“I- truly?” Gereon asked, confused.  
  
“It was a shock to me as well,” Caron said. “I’ve seen your apprentice’s work- both in terms of his research and his dueling. I don’t imagine that he stayed on the sidelines during the fighting, and that would normally be enough to make the Wardens want him, and want him badly.”  
  
Livia must have done something, then- used her pears as leverage, perhaps.  
  
“And he refused to join the Wardens and receive your cure?” Gereon inquired.  
  
She hesitated. “I’m not sure I should be telling you this,” she said at long last. “But it was implied in the missive I received that he voiced intentions to discover a cure for the Blight all on his own.”  
  
Oh, _of course_ he did. Of course. “That does sound like Dorian,” Gereon said, forcing a smile. “Do you know when they’re expected to return?”  
  
“It should be within the week. The missive I received stated that they’d reached Tallo and were searching for a ship willing to dock at Minrathous, and as fast as our courier system might be, it is not that fast.”  
  
“Quite,” Gereon replied. “Is he… very ill?”  
  
“It was not said. But it they seemed to think that he would survive the trip, which would suggest that he was still quite fit.”  
  
“Good, good,” Gereon said absently. “Thank you for informing me.”  
  
“You’re welcome,” Caron said, standing. “I’ll see myself out, then.”

Gereon nodded. She left.  
  
The world did not seem quite real.  
  
That state of being persisted until the day they returned home. Gereon had not allowed himself to imagine what the Blight might do to Dorian, and therefore was wholly unprepared to face the reality of it. Dorian looked utterly wretched, his skin ashen and his eyes sunken far into his head, facts which were only highlighted by the lack of kohl, the disheveled hair, and the stubble. He was leaning heavily on Felix as he stumbled his way out of the carriage, exhaustion in every line of his body.  
  
Dorian forced a smile when he saw him approach. It looked like it took a lot of effort. “Gereon,” he said.  
  
That was as far as he got before Gereon threw his arms around Dorian and Felix both. Livia came up behind them and wrapped her arms around them too, and for a long moment the four of them merely stood there, swaying on the gravel. Then Gereon pulled away, keeping one of his hands on Dorian’s shoulder.  
  
“We’re going to fix this,” he promised him.  
  
“Yes,” Dorian agreed. His smile was genuine this time, if small. “We will.”

**Author's Note:**

> The twelve chapter count is a rough estimate. God only knows how long this will end up being.
> 
> Somewhere in the midst of writing about the long walk through the Anderfels, I realized that whenever I couldn't find specific details for how people traveled in the olden days, I just substituted using The Oregon Trail as my guideline. I kind of feel like I should write a Modern AU where the Laysh Trail is a video game everyone remembers playing from their youth now. 
> 
> If you're wondering why the names Eram Kader, Sidona Andras, and Leonie Caron sound familiar: those are the default names for the Orlesian Wardens you can play in Awakenings.
> 
> Chalbat is me squishing together the words "chal" and "shubat", which are both names for the fermented camel's milk drink popular in Central Asia. You should assume that the Anderfel version is actually very alcoholic, rather than being akin to drinkable yogurt. 
> 
> That was the Nightmare demon Dorian encountered in the Fade. The darkspawn are heading to Tevinter because Corypheus is there.


End file.
